No Evidence Available
by Kiski
Summary: Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC
1. Chapter 1

_**Note:**__ I've thought about writing about both of the relevant topics of this before, but always chickened out for fear of being too cliché, but… I think I can manage it now that I had a brainchild and she's __**perfect**__. Oh, Jennifer, Jennifer… _

_This story will act as a sequel to __**You're So Spoiled!**__ but also function as a standalone story. It'll just make more sense if you've read __**YSS!**__. _

_Edit: I feel like this is boring. I'm trying not to be boring, but there's just so goddamn much I have to introduce without being boring. Also, I keep wanting to put (You're So Spoiled!) as the separator. I spent too much fucking time on that goddamn story._

_Double-Edit: I still feel like this is boring. Goddamn it. I promise it won't stay boring._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter One_

Mokuba was dating another green-eyed brunette. This one seemed relatively complacent, at least, which was a pleasant change from the last.

He watched the dark-haired boy eye him resentfully as he guided his latest beau out of the office.

Seto Kaiba sighed.

Four years had made _Yggdrasill_, his virtual reality console, a massive success. The machine itself came in three forms: Affordable Public Console, complete with headgear, sensory leg braces and gloves; Arcade Immersion Console, built for extended abuse and easily adjustable use for a wide variety of users; Private Immersion Console, the gaming platform for the rich and the obsessed, built for extended periods of use, individually constructed for the purchaser's specific body type and as much a decoration piece as a virtual reality system.

All three had the same token design: an artist representation of the Norse world tree itself. It had been his design team's idea, and feeling magnanimous at the time, he had allowed them to run wild with the idea. The result was astounding. Even the public pieces looked more like art than heavy, tough virtual reality technology. The private pieces were beyond exquisite- enough for even him to enjoy the offset of the rich greens and browns against the dark and icy colours of his office.

It looked good for him to have his own masterpiece in his own office. His brother had told him that it worked on the same level as the skinny chef theory and lent him credibility.

He found it amusing that even his own little brother doubted that he used his own equipment and played his own games.

The truth of the matter was that _Yggdrasill: PIC_ had been largely an exercise in self-indulgence. Seto Kaiba didn't use the immersion console in his work office- he used the one in his home office.

Had he felt the need to explain himself to others, it would've been easily dismissible under the pretense of the obsessive, neurotic hands-on work ethic everyone knew that he possessed anyway. In truth, it was only partially that.

_Yggdrasill _had a variety of channels- individual planes, each with their own individual hubs in various countries- encapsulated in the original nine Norse worlds. _Midgard_ was the starting point of all new players, and the most densely populated and the oldest; _Asgard _the realm of returning champions and the paying elite. Above, there was _Vanaheim_, realm of the _Vanir_, gods of wisdom, _Nidavellir_, realm of dwarves, and _Alfheim_, realm of elves: each served as alternate start points for less accomplished warriors and as sources of more basic quests.

Below, _Svartalfheim_, realm of the dark elves, _Jotunheim_, realm of giants, _Niflheim_, land of ice and mist, and _Helheim_, the underworld, home of the goddess _Hel: _each served as more difficult levels for more accomplished warriors, providing more challenging quests. It was a system that worked.

The base fantastical nature and sheer age of the mythology itself provided huge variation in admissible quests, places, even monsters.

It had been a hit on release. Four years later, and the population of players on _Yggdrasill_ had exploded to the point that his developers were scrambling to expand existing planes and add new quests and enemies to compensate.

The appeal of the game for the public seemed to be possibility that anything could happen.

For him, the appeal was the impossibility of recognition.

Since her disappearance, he had resisted the overwhelming urge to track her obsessively. He had first reacted with panic, certain that she'd either been kidnapped or had gone back on her word, still preoccupied with her fading drug grudge, but he knew her better than that.

She'd emptied out her apartment- the place looked like it had never been lived in. He'd found her old futon in a thrift store less than three blocks away; her coffee table had found its way into her neighbor's tiny living room. Her landlord had told him that she'd paid the next two months up front and an hour later, the apartment had been empty.

She'd boarded a plane to her home state at fifteen minutes to one that afternoon and had arrived safely just after midnight. Three weeks later, she'd registered at a technical college three states away, but dropped out less a week before classes started. Her housing application had been denied on the inability to contact her previous landlord.

A month later, her name was removed from the phone book and she closed her chequing account, withdrawing the last thirty-five dollars and sixty-two cents she had to her name.

She had disappeared again.

Mokuba had made it very clear that he expected his older brother to pursue her, and when he had not, Seto Kaiba had discovered something else.

His brother had inherited both his possessive streak and his propensity to obsess. In a bitter passive-aggressive display of disapproval, he had begun to take every opportunity to remind his brother of exactly how he felt about his inaction.

As Mokuba had recently turned eighteen and gained all the belligerent cockiness he himself had possessed at eighteen, coupled with Mokuba's own undeniable charisma, the trend had come down to the lowest common denominator: Women.

Thin, dark-haired, green-eyed women. Intense women. Very slightly insane women.

To compound the issue, following the success of _Yggdrasill_, the media had gotten wind of the assignment that had spurred the whole situation to begin with _and_ the resultant abandonment, and his pervasive image as the cold, rich bachelor had transcended inescapably into that of the tormented, lonely, extremely rich bachelor.

His personal life was hellish.

He considered it appropriate that his spawn point in _Yggdrasill_ was _Helheim_.

He was eying his work office immersion console. He'd never used it, but as far as paperwork went, his workload was running light, he'd run out of appointments, and it had been a particularly hellish day.

It would also look good to be caught having what appeared to be fun.

He decided for it.

He immersed.

_(No Evidence Available)_

When the design team had created a character for him, the newest member had proposed an infinitely recognizable and unique custom-made characterform to alert others when a high-level moderator was around.

One of the older design team members had already set up an account with an NPC characterform that appeared to be the same generic, empty-looking suit of iron plate-mail that appeared decoratively in most human cities, under the ambiguous name _Wandering Knight_.

The character had every appearance of an NPC. The generic 'suit of armour' characterform was known to be non-speaking. To most players, he appeared to be a non-interactive NPC. He was largely left alone.

He'd doubled the man's pay and promoted him to head of the team.

It was a decision he did not regret.

He loaded into _Yggdrasill_ easily. Sometimes the load was disorienting, if the room left was bright and the loading area dark, or vice-versa. The city of _Hel_ was always comfortably half-lit.

He began his semi-obsessive check of the city itself, reassuring himself that his programming was holding strong against the steady increase of users _Helheim_ was seeing. From there, he had both work and personal interests: The recent addition to _Helheim:_ the new cave system to the South.

He enjoyed travelling in the worlds of _Yggdrasill_. Despite the vast distances he was sometimes required to cross on foot, the scenery was explicitly detailed.

All of _Helheim_ had been stylized after and inspired by the works of Howard Lovecraft to produce the correct feeling of grotesque wrongness that his design crew had felt was necessary. He enjoyed the result.

From afar, the city of _Hel _revealed itself to have been set on wildly uneven terrain; from within the city, the buildings appeared to have been stretched where the ground dipped low, and squashed down where it rose. The entire top of _Hel _was level despite the massive incline of the ground. Combined with the sometimes sickly yellowish cast of the stone walls and heavily suggestive masonwork, from a distance, the city looked like an indistinct and alarming yellow-grey monstrousity leaning against a mountain.

He enjoyed that the most.

_Helheim_ itself was black, rocky, suggestively volcanic, and pervasively damp. He was following a river he knew led to the caves, and as he walked, he marvelled at the workmanship that had gone into making it so disturbing.

The river looked thick, slightly opaque, like someone had poured soupy dark grey gelatine down the countryside. Under the slow rolling water, he could see something large and flat darting sinuously along the bottom. Something glittered gold along its snout as it darted away.

He wondered which of his design team had created that.

The caves were in sight. His first impression was a feeling of burgeoning approval and interest.

The cave mouth was too low and wide to enter comfortably, forcing the player to stoop. There were cave openings all up the cliff face- in some of them, he could see a faint suggestion of yellowish slime. The ground in front of the cliff was free of the scruffy yellow-green and wilted vegetation that peppered the rest of _Helheim_. The disturbing river flowed into the mouth of the main cave, disappearing down into the blackness.

He stooped, and stepped inside.

The designers had done a good job- despite the caves still being empty of monsters, the sensation of having to squat and shuffle, half-bent, crab-like, and with his neck stretched forward, did provoke a strong sense of budding unease and claustrophobia. The light was minimal, and the river began a rapid decline into the bowels of the world. His feet slid forward and down on the loose rocks and mud, grabbing the walls for balance.

The passage opened into a massive underground lake.

He took a moment to send a notification of approval to the member of the team that was active before stepping in.

Something suddenly moved along the far wall. He frowned. _'There shouldn't be monsters yet. Nakamura is arguing his contract terms again.'_

As it came into the somewhat alarming yellow light emanating from the lake, he realized it was another player. The player perked up on seeing him, and stood straight.

_"Oh, hello,"_ it said in English. The voice was rich, low, a little effeminate. As it rounded the lake, it a heavy iron lantern, and the dark room burst into a comparison of black shadows and scalding red light. He realized why he hadn't seen the player before it had moved.

It was an extremely thin, massively androgynous characterform wearing the indistinct black skinform available in _Hel_ to those who had completed the city's quest set. He eyed the player silently.

It moved closer. _"I know you're a moderator. Even a wandering NPC wouldn't have had the caves input into its available routes yet. We're not __**that**__ efficient."_

He sighed. The sound came through breathy and metallic. _"Which hub do you work for?"_

It chuckled and summoned an account statistics screen for him. _"Detroit."_ The stat screen identified the player as a male under the username _AppSpo_. He wondered about it without really caring.

He waved away the screen. _"Why are you here? The caves won't have monsters for at least two weeks."_

_AppSpo_ gestured carelessly and fluidly. Kaiba realized that he was using an immersion pod, and then wondered why he was surprised by that. _"U.S. hubs haven't updated yet, and won't until Monday, so western channels don't have the caves yet- I went on the Domino channel to see what the ruckus was. I'm moving, and transferring to an eastern hub tomorrow, so this'll be my problem before it's anyone else's."_

Kaiba accepted that and gestured to the American moderator to follow him. _"The caves will be closing for maintenance now that they've been approved,"_ he explained. The dark, skinny low-level mod trotted after him eagerly. The climb out was somewhat arduous given the mud, but the low ceiling proved to be less of a challenge whilst leaving rather than entering.

_AppSpo_ whistled when the caves suddenly vanished, leaving only the river puddling into a hole too small to enter. He minced after Kaiba when he tried to escape discreetly.

"_You must be from Head Office, if you have approval capabilities," _he asserted.

Kaiba nodded reticently.

_AppSpo's_ face was too dark to differentiate features, but he sounded awed. _"So you actually work for Kaiba Corporation?"_

He nodded again.

The skinny mod sped up to keep pace with him. _"How is that? I was hired from home as a heavy user. Truthfully, I've never actually been to the Detroit hub itself." _

He went to nod, but something occurred to him. He stopped abruptly and turned to the scrawny American. _"How are you using an immersion console if you're a volunteer moderator?"_

_AppSpo _skidded to a stop, obviously startled, and lost his balance, thudding down on the dusky ground. _"My husband bought it to keep me occupied,"_ he said simply.

For a moment, Kaiba was too startled to speak, but suddenly felt a little foolish.

'_Yggdrasill, where anything is possible: Even spoiled gay part-time-moderating househusbands.'_

He wasn't sure why that made him feel somewhat fonder of the American.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He didn't like Toshio Nakamura.

The man had a broad, handsome face and for all appearances did excellent work, but he was jumpy, nervous and he blinked too much. He also had a great deal of difficulty communicating the motivations behind his ideas without rambling incoherently.

Nothing about him was concise, from his spindly fingers to his propensity to go into tangents about his wife; he was a man who wasted time, and the fine quality of his work was all that kept Kaiba civil towards him.

Nakamura had finally agreed on a rewrite of the contract that didn't stipulate a timeframe- the deal was to be a strict exchange of goods for money. Kaiba liked that. He hoped that it meant Nakamura would leave Domino- or at least stop his ceaseless muttering about missing his wife and his concerns over returning to Japan after emigrating.

At the very least, he thought, watching Nakamura grip the pen between his skinny fingers and sign it, it would mean that he would have his monsters.

Nakamura was a successful graphic artist, and had worked in a storyboard team on several low-budget horror films. Almost a year before, he had sent in a tentative and unassuming folder of grotesque monster sketches when word had gotten out that Kaiba Corp. was expanding _Helheim_.

Kaiba had liked them.

Kaiba still liked them.

Kaiba didn't like Nakamura, however hard he tried.

Nakamura slid the new contract, now signed, over to him. It looked all his willpower not to snatch it from him as Nakamura started tapping his fingers nervously on the header.

He signed it and the copy, handed one to his secretary, and all but threw the other at Nakamura.

Nakamura stammered something about looking forward to the _Yggdrasill _world expansion press release and Kaiba flinched inwardly.

He had been trying to forget about it.

It would be his first public appearance in over six months. His public relations unit had insisted it was integral for the company that he go with the design team to announce it officially.

He wasn't looking forward to it.

His public life was almost as hellish as his personal life.

_(No Evidence Available)_

On the way home, he crossed paths with someone who looked like her from behind.

The girl had smiled at him when she saw him looking. He'd looked away quickly.

When he arrived home, his brother was fighting- loudly- with his new girlfriend about something.

There was a note in the mail requesting he pick up his suit for the press release.

Kaiba locked himself in his home office and immersed.

He found himself strangely relieved to find _AppSpo_ online.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	2. Chapter 2

_**Note:**__ Onwards to chapter two, let us plough through nervousness and inhibition and plunge ourselves into the crazy realm of crazy alternate reality and witness crazy, unbelievable things._

_Or… boring, awful press releases where no one is actually interested in talking about the subject at hand. Those are pretty crazy, too._

_Edit: Nice to see a few of my reviewers have followed me over. (: _

_**WandererRaen**__, without fail, I can't hear your reviews as anything other than someone talking super-fast whilst hyperventilating, and sometimes I worry about your health. :D_

_It's a smilies day. _

_Double-Edit: I may intend to throw curve ball after curve ball at you, by the way. One of you has a vague, off-centre idea of what's going on, but she's not quite there yet, either._

_Quad-Edit: Just in case anyone hadn't figured this out already or it just hadn't occurred, __**Yggdrasill**__ is the gaming system Kaiba mentions that he's working on in Chapter Two of __**You're So Spoiled!**__ and continues to work on throughout the rest of the story (except when he gets all fucked up and sleepless.). He's working out the glitch in the programming on his computer. :D _

_Yay, continuity! The game itself is what his mentioned 'gaming staff' (lols) was working on and needed to port to his malfunctioning console- aka, they were his design team. Those lovely people were around then, too! I promise you'll get to know them better, too; because they're pretty cool. You know, cool nerds._

_I told you I inadvertently wrote __**YSS!**__ with the intention of continuing it. It's really kind of alarming how often my subconscious does things without telling me first._

_Triple-Edit: Half of this has been done for over a week. This should've been up a million billion years ago. I'm sorry._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Two_

The suit fit perfectly, of course.

His hair looked spectacular, as usual.

The press was buzzing over how quintessentially edible he would look, indubitably.

Sometimes Seto Kaiba wished that he had been born ugly.

Tonight was definitely one of those times.

The air had been swimming with a sharklike hunger for blood all week. The press on the other side of the door, waiting, shifting, tittering like hyenas with narrow eyes in the showroom, was breathing sharp artificial air through their teeth. Outside, everyone else swam in the late August heat, looking over their shoulders for teeth. The city was tense, expectant.

Deep down, they all knew what he knew.

Being loved by the press was only slightly better than being hated by them, if only by a tight, dark margin just big enough to breathe in.

He knew the inevitable truth: The less he appeared, the more they scrambled for him to. The more he appeared, the more they pried at his mouth and his eyes like unqualified doctors, wanting to climb inside and see.

The door was a big, heavy thing, but he'd learned to open it smoothly. If he'd faltered, stopping to shove, and the press had hated him, the subtext of every article would be his weak nature.

Because they loved him, it would be his tentative, alluring vulnerability, a little homage to the persona that they had created, more chum to the sharks.

The stage was always too bright, and always set too close to the door, and he had to remind himself to catch the first step in his stride before his eyes had a chance to adjust. The stage creaked imperceptibly. He hoped it wasn't telling him that it had been tampered with.

The microphone was set too low. He took a moment to adjust it, slowly, casually, as though it didn't matter. The press loved a showman, but they loved a fumbler more.

Mistakes made them hungry.

His eyes had adjusted. He could that the room had been tastefully decorated in rich browns, tans and greens. There were gold accent pieces that bordered on gaudy, but that was showmanship. The press loved it.

He bared his teeth for them, pulling back his lips in a hard caricature of a smile, and they beat their wrists and palms together limply so as to not upset their manicurists.

He could feel the design team close behind him, trying hard not to huddle. They were nerds, introverts, the graduates that blossomed from the brilliant university outcasts, and they were terrified.

He suddenly understood why it had been insisted that he come.

He realized that he'd already started talking, letting his mouth run after a respectfully brief pause, the inevitable result of years of jumping through hoops for people whose names he never remembered. He stopped to smile for a moment. There were a few amorous titters in the hush. They liked it when he smiled.

They'd like it if he cried, panicked, threw a chair across the room and screamed, but smiling- smiling made them comfortable.

So he smiled for them.

He was wrapping up his explanation for the necessity of _Yggdrasill_ world expansions when he spotted Nakamura, sitting alone in a shabby pinstripe suit and looking characteristically nervous. Nakamura nodded hastily at him, almost fervent enough to be disrespectful and looking more like one of his drawings than himself in the glare of the overhead fluorescents.

The design team head had stepped forward to take the microphone and answer questions. Kaiba nodded to the crowd. They pursued their avenue of limp-wristed clapping.

He escaped down the side of the room, looking for Mokuba.

He found him entertaining the same girl who he'd been engaged in a screaming match with just days before. Kaiba considered that a small blessing and moved on.

A thousand hellos from members of the inevitable after-release congregation landed him, sweating in layers of English wool, at Nakamura's table. Nakamura smiled nervously at him, immediately fidgeting.

Kaiba wondered vaguely if Nakamura only fidgeted around people, or if he was just as nervous alone.

"My wife didn't come," Nakamura blurted suddenly. Kaiba took that as an invitation to sit and ignore his previous companions. One of them burbled something faux-understanding about their having business together, and they moved away.

Nakamura was still talking. "My wife, she stayed at home- the move's been hard on both of us after so long," he explained.

Kaiba was almost incredulous enough to care. _'You've only been apart for three months.'_

"She isn't taking the culture shock well- she left Japan when she was a little girl- I think I told you that- and, as you know, living out west is very different-"

Kaiba was resisting the urge to strangle him, and instead, looked up at the ceiling. Someone had coiled fake ivy around the hanging lights, presumably for those in his situation. He thanked them silently.

Two fingers pressed lightly into his shoulder twice. He looked, desperate for an out.

He had never been more ecstatic to see his secretary, even if he had trouble remembering her name.

She was something pretty, someone he had hired in response to Mokuba's constant meddling who had happened to be very competent in addition to the patience he had required at the time. There was a rollercoaster of curve between her shoulder and her thigh, and he could see Nakamura glancing at it nervously.

Kaiba smiled his own hard shark smile at him, and Nakamura jerked back, suddenly still. His secretary- _'Yuuki, Yuuko, something like that'- _beckoned patiently for him to follow.

Her hair was down in billowing milk chocolate curls that night, looking as much at home with the decorations as the ivy on the lights. Her green skirt and off-white blouse didn't help shake the illusion. He wondered if it was intentional, and decided that it probably was with a surge of affection.

He had kept her because she was calm, patient, respectful and efficient. It helped that she was pleasant to look at it, with a sweet round face and dark, smiling eyes under quizzically arched black brows. The overall impression was disarming. It was useful, and she used it well.

She smiled disarmingly at him, and he knew something was wrong. There was worry in Yuuna's smiling eyes.

The press was starting to notice that she was leading him away.

She quickened her walk into a brisk trot, and he took the signal, matching her pace. Out of habit, he almost placed his hand on her back to speed her, but caught himself. Any sign of an intimate relationship with his secretary was the last fish he needed to throw out of the boat.

She had him through the heavy door just as they started to surge out of their flocklike formation. She bolted it with a soft grunt. He realized she'd already ushered his design team in, and they looked like the recovering survivors of a hurricane.

The design team head was an older man, with the weathered, capable look of a retired sailor. He was holding the sodden collar of his dress shirt away from his throat and staring with an expression of incredulous awe at Kaiba's heavy suit jacket.

The young billionaire pretended that he couldn't feel the hot sweat snaking down his spine, and just smiled wryly.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Kaiba's design team had perfected the newest expansion to the south _Helheim_ cave system, and he was enjoying exploring it, even if it meant he often had to scrabble through steep, narrow holes. He could feel still the dirt grinding between the metal plates of his gauntlets. It was an odd sensation.

_AppSpo_'s lithe form took the tunnels more easily, and Kaiba often sent him ahead to check that they hadn't run afoul of a dead end. The greyish dust of the drier, higher-set tunnels left silvery streaks on the young man's black skinform. As he scrambled down, limbs a-splay, skinny fingers groping, from a high opening in the wall, the millionaire could see a huge swath of white down his legs.

_AppSpo_ smiled cheerfully. _"This one circles up to that opening- it'll be great for long-ranged weapons users when the cave has monsters, but it doesn't go anywhere. It's full of chalk, though. Are we expanding the mining feature to Helheim?"_

Kaiba continued to be surprised at the skinny mod's deductive power. _"Yes," _he told him, trying to be stern. _"Keep it to yourself."_

The little moderator saluted firmly. There was a wash of white from his neck to his knees. Kaiba instinctively turned his head to hide his smile before remembering that his characterform's face was non-expressive.

_AppSpo_ had caught onto his body language and chortled happily, mincing around with a muscular lack of grace that Kaiba couldn't help but find nostalgic and endearing. _"You are far less stoic and imposing than you aim to be, sir," _he teased, wiggling his long, bony fingers expressively.

When the American had persisted in following him, he'd tried to drive him off with his usual unemotive coldness. After a week of_ AppSpo's_ puppyish tailing, he was having difficulty convincing himself that he didn't find the company at least somewhat pleasant.

_AppSpo _was chatty, preferring to talk about the aesthetic form of the game rather than the programming that went into it, and almost aggressively happy, even when he complained about the difficulties of the move and his husband's vague and uncommunicative nature. He'd quickly revealed himself to be highly intuitive, hyper-expressive, and very in-tune with the small expressive movements of others, and even Kaiba had to admit that it was a refreshing change.

It had been almost four years since anyone had openly dismissed his serious nature. He realized suddenly that he'd missed that.

_AppSpo_ was still mincing, and Kaiba swatted at him instinctively. _AppSpo_ crab-walked, covering his head. _"Don't hit me! My characterform is very delicate." _He said it with the primness of a girl showing off her ostentatious cupcake manicure. _"You might kill me with a touch, you brute."_

He couldn't stop himself from stiffening. _AppSpo_ noticed immediately. _"What's wrong?"_

Kaiba pulled his hand from the immersion glove and ran it over his real face, trying not to groan. _"Fe allech chi ladd mi heb gyffwrdd fi,"_ he muttered. He could still see her vividly, sitting on the floor with his wrist in her hands, running her fingers up the pale skin on the inside of his arm. He could still hear her saying it, laughing, trying to avoid having to explain. _AppSpo _looked puzzled and a little alarmed.

The little moderator shuffled uncomfortably for moment, primly dusting chalk off of his legs and running his hand over his bare black skull as though he was smoothing back his hair. _"..What's wrong?"_ he repeated again. It almost didn't sound like a question. Kaiba wondered if the young man was intuitive enough to have caught on to the gist of his discomfort, despite the bizarreness of the language spoken.

_"You remind me of…"_ he considered what to call her. _"...An ex-girlfriend." _He ran his hand through his real hair, taking the American's cue."_Sometimes."_

_ AppSpo_ looked profoundly apologetic and almost guilty. _"I'm sorry. Did you want me to go?"_

He shook his head and slid his hand back into the immersion glove. _"It was a long time ago."_ He didn't know what else to say. It wasn't something he talked about.

With anyone.

He wondered if that was part of Mokuba's frustration.

The skinny mod sat down on the ground with a thump, stick-like legs splayed in the dust like remainders of a half-crushed centipede. He looked up with an expression of earnest sympathy. _"Fuck love," _he said suddenly, and then added, _"Sir."_ Kaiba didn't know if he wanted to laugh. _AppSpo_ resumed speaking before he had to. _"There's no such thing as a true fairytale."_

He smiled privately at that. The young man seemed to know. _"There are circumstances remarkably less bizarre than mine," _he told him. _AppSpo_ laughed.

_"We've all been there once." _His shrug was dismissive, a half-lift of one bony shoulder and a slouch forward. _"Or more than once. I used to think that the truth was imperative." _He laughed again. _"And then I discovered that what's true and what's correct isn't always the same thing."_

His words were so obviously personal, so poignant, that Kaiba almost felt as though he should have known what the American was talking about. He very nearly felt guilty for asking.

_AppSpo_ looked up at him with a wry smile so characteristic of his dogged cheerfulness that he couldn't help but smile reflexively in return. _"I left him without saying anything, you know. I never explained why." _

He couldn't ask, but he didn't need to. The American seemed to comprehend that their conversation covered two sides of the same moral coin. _"I never knew my father growing up," _he admitted. _"My mother didn't tell me until I was an adult."_

His smile was a little too bitter to be genuine.

_"As it turned out, he was his father, too."_

_(No Evidence Available)_

His design team head, Jii Tokigawa, was ordinarily a very polite, reserved man.

When he burst into his office and launched immediately into a hushed and angry demand for his attention, Seto Kaiba knew something was very wrong.

"Nakamura left the development lab unlocked last night," he ranted. His face was pale, and tight with distress. "We've checked it thoroughly: None of the computers were used since being shut down last night, and nothing appears to have been taken or moved, but the _door was unlocked all night_." Tokigawa scrubbed a broad, rough hand over his face and back through his short, receding hair. "I don't need to tell you that this could have been disastrous, Kaiba-sama," he said desperately.

Kaiba could feel the hard knot of dislike for Nakamura he kept pushed down just below his ribcage surge upwards against his lungs. He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're certain nothing had been tampered with?" Tokigawa gave him a sharp nod. Kaiba jabbed a finger down onto his desk emphatically. "The instant Nakamura gets here, send him to me." He stopped and thought for a moment and then frowned. "And have his access pass revoked. I don't want him alone in that lab again."

Jii looked appeased. A mutual understanding had been reached. Kaiba didn't have to clarify that the design team head himself would be watching Nakamura to know that it was true.

That was why he'd promoted him in the first place.

The instant Tokigawa left, Kaiba lifted the remains of the invoice he'd been restlessly tearing to pieces from under his desk and tossed them in the garbage.

His palms had been a victim of his containing his anger. He inspected them with distaste before alerting his security staff of his new concern.

There were a few basic rules in business that everyone knew.

He knew that even Nakamura wasn't stupid enough to forget the fundamentals.

Nobody left the door unlocked when millions of dollars of information and equipment were at stake.

Not casually.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	3. Chapter 3

_**Note:**__ Hahaha, oh, __**WandererRaen**__, you're too damn cute. Like a puppy, really. An excitable Jack Russell Terrier. And you know who the American is, do you? Well, then, girly-girl, you've got everything figured out, haven't you?_

_Edit: I wrote the first part of this the way that I did because I came to the sudden realization that there is nothing quite as creepy as being silently stared at when you've done something wrong._

_Special Edit: Nothing makes me feel quite as grateful for my life as realizing how suddenly anyone can die. If you have the time, read Satoshi Kon's (__**Paprika**__,__** Tokyo Godfathers**__) final letter. Excuse me, now I have to go cry out what little of a heart I have left._

_Third-Edit: I __**will **__teach you about simple invertebrates, like it or not! (A crop is the stomach/food pantry of a worm or leech.) I didn't intend that to happen, anyway. It was like, "Yo, I'm here." And I was like, "What, hey, you weren't invited." And then it came in anyway and it was really gross._

_Fourth-Edit: I'm a huge asshole. When did that happen?_

_Post-Posting-Edit: Fixed some bullshit errors I made. Fleshed out some sparse parts. Should be a smoother read now, for those of you who (like me) get really annoyed and distracted by noticeable errors._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Three_

If Yuuna was anyone but herself, he would've called what she was doing 'lurking'.

Because she was, in fact, Yuuna, he considered her to be hovering politely with great insistency.

He could understand why she was unwilling to interrupt, despite the fact that neither of them were actually speaking.

Nakamura had first tried explaining himself in sporadic bursts of meaningless chatter for a period that had only been minutes but had felt like hours. After that, he'd tried speaking- quite rationally, if somewhat meanderingly- about what had happened. Finally, he'd settled into borderline terrified silence.

Seto Kaiba hadn't settled on what to say to Nakamura yet.

So he hadn't said anything yet.

They had been in his office for over two hours.

Nakamura visibly had to urinate, but was too nervous to ask. Sweat was pouring down his attractive square face and catching shallow beams of light from the open glass wall behind Kaiba's desk.

He'd kept the picture window as a personal challenge to anyone who wanted to throw _him_ out of it. He'd first had the vague impression that he could lure his stepfather's murderer back when he'd taken over his office.

Now, the sharp western backlighting his office garnered in the evening tended to make people squint and squirm.

Kaiba, admittedly, enjoyed watching Nakamura squirm.

It was Yuuna who was brave enough to break the silence.

"Sir, Genjikou Industrial is on line two."

He nodded for her to connect him. Before she left his office, her eyes flickered to Nakamura, and she sent him a flat look of disapproval. He had to stop himself from raising his eyebrows in surprise. It was rare that Yuuna showed any sort of emotive reaction to his actions other than attentive pleasantness.

He decided that he enjoyed her silent reprimand more than he resented it.

The waiting light on his phone flared into life. As he went to pick it up, Nakamura stood hastily, muttering something.

Kaiba stopped and looked at him.

Nakamura sat back down.

The call from Genjikou would turn out to be a long one.

Kaiba would begrudgingly admire the graphic designer's resilience when it hit the two hour mark.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Mokuba Kaiba was still wearing his shoes, kicking the hard rubber and canvas toe of his sneaker against the carpeting by the sofa. The barest hint of patchy black stubble was coming through on his cheeks, but he was rubbing the deep, angry welts his latest imitation had left on him with her long acrylic nails.

Seto Kaiba could see him from the kitchen.

Mokuba turned towards him with an expression halfway between resentment and sheepishness. "You saw?"

Kaiba raised his eyebrows inexpressively. "Of course."

Mokuba relaxed, tensed, and loosened again, rubbing the back of his neck with an ever-ganglier palm. "She'll find her way out."

He tried to resist.

He couldn't.

"You should go after her."

Mokuba sent him a sharp look. His returning stare was noncommittal. He could see Mokuba's jaw tightening against anger. All the teen said was "I wouldn't have to."

He didn't have to end his sentence.

The air was dead silent but for the soft hum of the track lighting in the kitchen. There was a strange line between the rooms where artificial and natural light met, painting the floor in between in crooked strips of blue and yellow-tinged white.

Kaiba adjusted the timer on the oven. The clicking of the knob as he turned it was oppressively loud. "Why didn't _you_?" he asked.

Mokuba had folded his lanky arms across his chest, and was leaning back, looking down his nose in a way that Kaiba knew intimately. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Kaiba knew his brother's answer to that question was the same as his reason for not going after his girlfriend.

"_I wouldn't have to… if you had."_

He looked at his younger brother with an feeling of growing reproach. "What would you do if she came back now?" he asked him coolly. "It's been four years, Mokuba." He wanted to say more, but couldn't. _'We've been doing this for far too long.'_

Mokuba's flat, indifferent look didn't disguise that he had thought about it. "I'd probably marry her."

He was so startled that he couldn't choke off the sharp laugh that surprised him. The very idea was absurd. "_Marry_ _her__?_" Mokuba's indifferent look was melting back into pointed anger. "Mokuba," he said, exasperated. "Little brother." Mokuba tightened his arms across his chest. Kaiba shook his head and ran a hand down his face, finding himself incapable of taking the conversation seriously.

"Can you honestly imagine Jennifer getting _married?_"

From his acidic look, Mokuba evidently could. He left the room in the shambles his imitation Jennifer had left it in, and their relationship in the shambles the real one had.

Kaiba sighed.

He found himself wondering again why his real life didn't have a debugging function, and escaped to his life that did.

_(No Evidence Available)_

_AppSpo_ was as jovial and flamboyant as ever.

This was immediately evidenced by the sudden collision of his bony black body against Kaiba's armour. As it turned out, the walls of the _Helheim_ caves weren't the only thing the American had a monkeyish tendency to climb.

The cave system was closed again for expansion- because Nakamura was taking his sweet time perfecting his monster designs, the design team was taking time to further complicate the already treacherous tunnels with the _Helheim_ mining feature- still to be announced. From what Kaiba could tell, _AppSpo_ had been good to his word and had kept his mouth shut.

Today wasn't a work day, something Kaiba had trouble with. It felt strangely unnatural to just enjoy his artificial surroundings without dissecting them.

_AppSpo_, on the other hand, was revelling in it.

Because the tumultuous rainy season on the coast east of the city of _Hel_ had begun, _AppSpo_ had apparently decided that the best place to enjoy the rain was perched on top of his shoulders. Kaiba once again silently thanked Tokigawa for his foresight in using such a resilient characterform.

The American's knobby knees knocked against his helmet as he scrambled higher, looking over his head. The broad flat bottoms of his feet were sending hollow vibrations through Kaiba's armour as he struggled for grip against the smooth metal. _"You should see this, sir! The water looks fantastic!" _

_"I know it looks fantastic,"_ he said, fighting burgeoning annoyance. _"I approved it."_

_AppSpo_ slapped his hands against his helmet in what he assumed was playful delight. The reverberations were starting to make him dizzy. _"You never fail to impress, sir!"_ He scrambled off, half sliding down one of the brunette's arms before landing off-balance and falling with a _whuff_ to the ground. Kaiba felt eerily light without him. He was surprisingly heavy for such a thin characterform. The brunette considered taking that up with his design team.

_AppSpo_ had started running ahead, scrambling over the thick, high breakwater of wet black rocks that edged this section of the coast. _"Let's get closer!"_

He sighed. _AppSpo_ was having difficulty breasting a rather treacherous and slimy rock. Kaiba helped prudently by shoving him over it. The little moderator tumbled over and out of sight with a small effeminate screech.

He sighed again, and started scaling the breakwater himself. The combination of rain and thick, viscous algae on the rocks and the cumbersome nature of his characterform made it a long, arduous and undignified ordeal which ended with him looking down from the top with a mounting headache and a serious lack of patience. "Why am I even doing this?" he muttered before he started his careful descent.

The tide was out, and the fast-drying, fine black volcanic sand stretched almost to the horizon. Tiny slivers of silvery-white glistened under the few pools of standing water. He eyed them warily. He seemed to remember approving some sort of leech-like monstrosity for the coast.

He saw something shift, mirage-like, in the distance, and after a moment's observation, concluded that it was _AppSpo_, prancing gleefully along the wet sand further out like some sort of hellish elf on fresh snow. While he had to shift himself occasionally to dislodge the sand creeping between the plates of his armour and remedy his steady sinking, the American's thinner, lighter frame barely left footprints when he ran.

At that moment, he was running towards him.

It took Kaiba a moment to realize that it wasn't a joyful run.

The source of the little moderator's distress was made evident when the leech-like monstrosity Kaiba vaguely remembered approving revealed itself.

_'Oh,'_ he thought. _'I thought it was smaller.'_

It was not smaller.

The tiny slivers of silver he had seen beneath the sand proved to be part of a much larger whole. The much larger whole was, in fact, extremely large. It was safe to say that the leech was part of a gargantuan class of monsters.

Kaiba wondered dispassionately why he'd forgotten that.

_AppSpo_ had started scaling him frantically again, sandy fingers grinding against his shoulderplates.

The _Hel Flats_ _Worm_'s round, jagged mouth and wet, eyeless black head were nightmare material. The streaked, inconsistent shimmers of silvery runic writing along its flat, sinuous body had an effect on the eye that was deceptive, even mesmerizing. Kaiba reminded himself to congratulate his design team on their hard work.

The leech started after them. Kaiba sighed again. _"I'm sorry," _he told _AppSpo_. It was almost sincere. The truth was that he did enjoy tormenting the smaller man sometimes.

The American was frantic with distraction. _"What? What? Why are you apologizing?"_

Kaiba threw him forcibly back over the breakwater.

The second time around, his now-expected screech was much funnier.

The leech's head hit him with a wet _thud_, and he grabbed at its hard, mismatched teeth with his gauntlets. The inorganic nature of his characterform proved to be an immediate advantage- though the scraping of its teeth against his armour with both deafening and inherently uncomfortable, the leech seemed equally puzzled.

After a moment of grappling, the heavy body of the monster pushing him further and further down into the sand, the leech had evidently made up its simple mind.

It swallowed him whole.

The tight sensation of constricting muscle pulling him forward quickly gave way to a wider, emptier darkness and sudden stillness. The constriction ceased, but he could feel the leech moving around him. Kaiba pushed his hands forward along the figurative 'floor' of the leech's crop, feeling invisible objects stick and roll idly beneath his fingers.

Something bumped lightly against his back when he shifted. He reached back blindly, uncertain. The smooth coldness of glass and metal came to his touch.

He resisted the urge to smile. It was _AppSpo_'s lantern, headring caught under the top edge of his shoulderplate. He wondered vaguely if that had happened when _AppSpo_ had climbed him or if the mischievous American had lodged it there originally to see if he would notice.

Regardless of the reason, he was glad to have it.

The oil lamp flared into life without hesitation. He almost wished it hadn't.

The leech's stomach was a mess of bones still connected with decaying ligaments or stubbornly rusting armour too big to pass through the rest of its intestinal track. He winced at the half-rotted, bare and lolling foot of a young adventurer and was beset with sudden relief that his characterform wasn't programmed for olfactory functions.

He shifted through the various weapons, frowning. The majority of them were beyond repair, too rusted for use. Even the one knife he found intact couldn't push far enough through the thick, sticky mucous lining the crop to have produce a reaction.

The only thing he found, sticky but seemingly untouched, was a smeared and dirty bottle of got-rut grain alcohol, a token of some unlucky new player's unsuccessful and eager jump from the warm and hospitable _Midgard_ to the less welcoming _Helheim_.

He almost felt bad for him.

The alcohol did nothing, pooling on top of the mucous ineffectually.

He sat, frowning at the inoffensive clear pool as it started to evaporate.

The lantern flickered behind him, making the shadows of the bones around him dance.

He laughed.

'_I am an imbecile.'_

The few remaining rags of clothing wrapping the bones around him were damp and slimy, but he supposed he could do without them.

The alcohol lit as cheerfully and happily as the lantern had. There was a second of stillness as it burned through the mucous.

The stomach suddenly constricted.

The sheer force of the leech's reflexive vomiting sent him flying over the breakwater and skidding along the ground he had covered only minutes before.

He stopped when he hit a small, thick patch of brushy undergrowth.

_AppSpo_ came running towards him, fervently checking over his shoulder that the leech wasn't crossing the rocks itself.

He stopped, breathless, when he reached him. Kaiba didn't even bother to get up.

The American just looked at him for a second, taking in the lantern he'd clung to and the bottle he wasn't sure how he'd managed to keep, along with the smattering of skeletons and rusted equipment that dotted the landscape around him.

When he did speak, _AppSpo_ sounded dumbfounded.

"_That was probably the grossest thing I have ever seen."_

He paused.

"_But also the coolest."_

_(No Evidence Available)_

Nakamura was desperately trying to make amends.

Seto Kaiba found that very funny and ironic.

Seto Kaiba also found it very annoying and obtrusive.

He wondered if Nakamura was worried he would finally get impatient enough to fire him.

Looking at the man's irritatingly likeable square jaw and nervous wide-set eyes, he considered it.

Nakamura was ushering him along cheerfully, slightly less inclined to rambling than usual, which was nice. He was dressed nicely, in cheaply made but new slacks and a matching jacket, crisp white shirt collar slightly askew behind his tie. Only his shoes were dirty, old dust starting to eat through their protective shine.

"I've made a lot of progress on the perspective shots for our monsters," he chattered cheerfully. "I think the variety of angles will make it easier for Jii and his team to animate them- he was complaining to me before that my drawing were too one-dimensional, and that he said that they needed more detail to work with-"

Kaiba frowned, tuning him out. _'Our?'_ he thought sceptically. _'The last thing I want is a rapport with you, Nakamura.'_

Nakamura was, of course, still talking. "-I am afraid that the size variations I'm working with may be cumbersome- Jii was showing me the dimensions of the cave system, and some of the larger designs may be somewhat cumbersome in the smaller passages- though I suppose implemented correctly, they could be quite frightening in a narrow tunnel- I almost wish I could ask-"

Kaiba resisted rolling his eyes. _'Somehow, I am not surprised that you haven't considered that they could also be scaled down very easily.'_

He was _still_ talking. "-always wanted to make something lasting, and _Yggdrasill_ is such a major force in the artistic world-"

Kaiba groaned quietly through his teeth, glad that the other man was walking slightly in front of him. Even with his strong square jaw, even in his neatly pressed suit, Toshio Nakamura still looked as young as he was- barely two years older than the brooding CEO himself. His rambling, occasionally inadvertently disrespectful Japanese made him seem even younger. Kaiba wondered if his distaste for the graphic designer was based on his inability to stop talking or if he would feel the need to hit him even if he was mute.

He had trouble justifying his dislike to himself; aside from the man's tendency towards flighty inconsistent speech and sudden occasional stupidity, he was a good worker, something Kaiba was accustomed to respecting regardless of his relationship with the person themself.

However hard he tried, he found himself incapable of respecting Nakamura.

Nakamura was gesturing cheerfully upwards towards an upscale apartment building. He was half-turned, smiling happily with his big, square herbivore teeth.

Kaiba frowned again. Maybe it was instinctive. _'Are you lower on the food chain than me, Nakamura?'_

As they stood in the elevator, Nakamura's words finally tapered off. The brunette looked at him expectantly. He smiled again, a tinge of nervousness surfacing under his persistent cheer. "Did I tell you that my wife is making us dinner?" he asked. "She's not much of a cook, but she's getting better."

He nodded vaguely, though he couldn't remember if Nakamura had. _'Bringing me to your home, feeding and flattering me is not going to change anything,'_ he thought dourly.

Nakamura had been insufferable since his mistake, so eager to please him that he had finally given in and agreed to Nakamura's invitation to have dinner with him and his wife. As the elevator chimed sweetly and the doors ground open to show the soft green floral wallpaper of the fifth floor, he had to forcibly repress the urge to regret it.

The graphic designer fumbled with the lock on his apartment door for long enough that Kaiba considered taking _her_ route and just destroying it for the satisfaction it would impart. The surge of affection the memory brought him let him surprise himself by smiling when Nakamura did get the door open. Nakamura seemed delighted rather than alarmed by his sudden change of attitude. Kaiba wondered if the man had ever actually caught on to the fact that he disliked him.

It was a mid-sized, earthy apartment decorated in warm reds and browns, with sparse Western-style furniture. Nakamura shuffled off his dirty shoes eagerly. "Please come in, _Mister_ Kaiba." He trotted towards the kitchen eagerly.

Kaiba tried to be leisurely about his movements. _'At least an English qualifier is some kind of respect,'_ he thought begrudgingly. Nakamura was talking to someone in the kitchen.

Kaiba joined him reluctantly, hoping his wife would be less frivolous. His socked feet made a soft s_hush-shush_ on the carpet as he walked.

The kitchen light was the glaring white-blue of a new incandescent bulb, and made her bare feet almost white against the dark blue linoleum.

She'd gained a not inconsiderable amount of weight, and under that too-familiar lace dress, her thin frame held the sweet suggestion of a curve. Her thick white hair had been cut short, barely longer than his, and in the downswept half-curl of it around her ear, he could see a few stubborn strips of resilient black.

Regardless, he knew her immediately.

From the way she was standing, arms rigor-mortis stiff over her strong-smelling crockpot, it was obvious to him that she did too.

Nakamura seemed oblivious. He grabbed her and whirled her around, dripping spatula still in her hand. Her face was as tight as her arms. His big white herbivore teeth were blinding.

"_Mister_ Kaiba, meet my wife, Jennifer."

_(No Evidence Available)_


	4. Chapter 4

_**Note:**__ Hey. Yeah, you. Do you remember how I told you that __**You're So Spoiled!**__ was never going to get as dark or crazy as __**White Alice**__? You do, eh?_

_This isn't __**YSS.**_

_Just thought you should know._

_Second-Edit: The first part of this was really difficult to write. I hope it doesn't seem forced; the atmosphere's just such a mixture of tension that it can be difficult to communicate._

_Third-Edit: Thank you to __**WandererRaen**__ and __**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto**__. What would I do without you guys to spur me to update? I love this story, but I hate writing and feeling like people don't enjoy it. (Though, __**WR**__, there's really no disguising how excited you get, and that's kind of great.)_

_Jennifer says stop. Jennifer says go. Jennifer says talk._

_Jennifer asks: __**I may be a terrible person, but did you miss me?**_

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Four_

Upon seeing him, Jennifer Nakamura, _née_ Nauswell, first had very calm, relaxing thoughts of suicide.

Shortly thereafter, she considered that killing her husband for bringing such madness upon her was more to the point of the problem.

Now, she was more concerned that the source of her problems to begin with was going to kill her husband before she could decide if she really wanted to.

She didn't know what Seto Kaiba's previous issue with her admittedly harebrained partner had been, but her appearance didn't seem to have calmed it.

At first, he'd just looked lost. His face had been pulled in such a familiar expression of young bewilderment that she'd had a surreal, paranoid moment where it seemed like she'd been gone for days, rather than years.

After that, he'd emanated palpable disbelief, just looking at her husband with a sort of wordless wonder and following his chatting and nervous gesturing with every appearance of blankness and occasionally glancing down at the quickly-cooling pot of chilli she'd promptly jostled and spilled everywhere, including on her own feet.

Now, as they sat across the dinner table from each other, a nervous Toshio beside her, his expression had changed into something she didn't remembering knowing, but knew nonetheless.

His mouth was squared tight, his eyes narrowed and pulled hard by the tension of the muscle in his face, and his back and shoulders were held stiffer and straighter than even his impeccable posture demanded. He wasn't even looking at her. He was looking at Toshio.

Despite the superficial politeness of his silence, there was nothing subtle about it. Everything about his taut, predatorial stance said _"I want to eat you."_

Even her steadfastly silly Toshio Nakamura had gotten the point. Consistently unsuccessful in his clumsy efforts to soothe the explosive atmosphere and completely unaware of the circumstances providing it, her husband was quickly nearing hysterics.

As far as he knew, she hadn't returned to Japan since her parents had left for America.

Her fears that Kaiba would bring up her return trips were allayed with the continuation of his menacing silence.

She wasn't entirely certain that it lessened the complexity and awkwardness of the situation. In fact, she was starting to wonder if it wasn't somehow worse.

She was also starting to remember why they had originally always fought.

His haughty, aggressive attitude was grating on her already raw nerves.

She put a hand on Toshio's knee to calm him, but made certain that her increasingly agitated- _'What? Ex-beau? Ex-lover?'_- old classmate knew that she was looking at him. _'This,' _she said silently, _'is mine.'_

His shoulder twitched, and he looked back at her with something malevolent and more darkly speculative. She saw another expression that she remembered dawning there, and felt a small paranoid surge of Toshio's rising hysteria.

It was the equally intent but much more patient _'Oh, I see.'_ expression.

The fact that he immediately, visibly relaxed and began speaking to her husband as though the entire thing had never happened worsened her fears. She remembered his mannerisms better than she wanted to.

As soon as she'd seen him, a little black door in the back corner of her skull had creaked open, hinges desperately needing oiling and doorknob a too-familiar smooth gold. It was in there that she'd shut him, his brother, his serious geometrical bedroom furniture, her more sporadic impulses, and a lot of things she wished she'd never learned.

She hadn't gone there in years. She hadn't been able to. Just having that line of white light across the hallway carpet again made her want to do and say things that would ruin the delicate image of normality she'd spent so long perfecting for her husband.

The _want_ was there, waiting expectantly on the other side of that line. She'd always known it would be the first to rush out.

The _want_ had always fuelled her most reckless urges. It was that _want _that had brought her hands to his hair that first time, though she was still tentatively convinced that it had been him who had kissed her first.

Her inability to fight the _want_ with any real efficiency had made her do a lot of things she wasn't sure if she regretted.

When she'd finally been able to get the door closed behind it, she'd booked a plane ticket home.

She wasn't sure if she regretted that, either.

The _want_ wasn't offering her any answers. Four years of ignoring it meant that it was stonewalling her, waiting for her to come to it, the little Kaiba living in the shadows of her head, equally reticent, doubly sure.

Now, his change of attitude was pushing at that door again, widening the strip of light to reveal bits of dusty furniture in a room she'd shut the lights off in a long time before.

She knew the room by feel because she'd needed it, and still needed it, open to survive. She'd opened it to catch her husband, and learning to grope blind in her own emotions made it easier for her to tell herself that letting Toshio believe that she loved him was just another necessary sin.

She did like Toshio, however much he blabbered. His face inspired in her the same familiar affection the large square head of a shaggy Saint Bernard did. He was always irrational and occasionally stupid, but predictable and therefore trustworthy. Rather than responding to his sweet, apologetic manner and attractive face, she'd found herself thinking,

_'I am so goddamn sick of surprises.'_

So she'd married him.

His cheerful inattention and gullibility made it easier to conceal her worse periods of self-medication.

Among other things.

Kaiba was looking at her again. She tuned back in.

Toshio was talking about his work contract in fast, low, nervous terms. She wondered if in some part of his dim canine mind he'd caught on to the nature of the tension they'd all shared and then dismissed that.

Toshio Nakamura was definitively not Seto Kaiba.

In all honesty, that was her real reason for marrying him.

He was fidgeting with his cup, the beaded glass slipping in his sweating palm and occasionally jarring down on the wood of the table with a ringing _thunk_.

Kaiba's glass only made a tiny _tck_ing sound as he set it down.

He addressed her.

"How are you finding your return trip to Japan, _Mrs._ Nakamura?"

He meant something by it beyond his simple distaste for her actions, but she was having a hell of a time figuring out what.

Being enshrined in the warm earthy reds of her décor only worsened her desire to stare him down as she'd been accustomed to. The fact that his eyes looked so unnaturally blue against the dark colours around him, and brought to mind so many drug-addled, delirious memories, made her want to demand answers in a crass, snide manner that would not hold in check with the character she was playing.

Having him nearby, let alone having him speak to her, was making it difficult for her to behave.

Something about him inspired her to a higher, almost transcendent level of oddity.

She wondered what Toshio would do if he knew.

She realized that she was already risking finding out when she met her husband's puzzled look and realized that she'd just been staring silently at the wall behind Kaiba's head for almost a full minute without answering.

"Ah…" she said, trying to reorganize her face into reassuring smile. "Much the same as I remember it."

His dark, satisfied look assured her that she hadn't succeeded.

_(No Evidence Available)_

She had to resist the resurfacing urge to shove her husband away when he placed his palm on her forehead.

_"Are you feeling alright, Jen?" _he asked her in a low English whisper. She pulled her mouth apart in a smile that may have been too forced, but she could still see Kaiba standing by the door on his phone, and that made it difficult to relax and concentrate on being good. She wondered anxiously if he planned to tell Mokuba.

It was both strangely relieving and alarming to discover that she was more worried about his brother more than about him. She puzzled over what that meant, pushing her unwillingness to open communication with her frequently too-loud subconscious.

She dug her nails into her leg, trying to bring herself up again. _'I've got to stop letting my mind wander off.'_

Toshio was waiting expectantly. "We should speak Japanese in Japan," she reprimanded him gently. _'And there's really no point in speaking English around him for the sake of privacy,' _she added palpable relief at a normal, somewhat timely response from her was almost insulting. She shoved aside her rising irritation, more than aware that he neither deserved it personally nor had done anything to warrant it anyway.

She knew very well where the source of her anxiety resided. She frowned at his back. _'He steps into sight and I instantly convert back into being utterly unreasonable. Ugh.'_

Toshio took her still restlessly scratching hand from her thigh and squeezed it. "Are you sure you're alright? You can stay home if you're not feeling well." he asked her quietly, running the edge of his thumb over her torn fingernails. She blinked, surprised that he'd noticed.

She found herself able to smile more sincerely, feeling a poignant little surge of affectionate for her pet breadwinner. "I wouldn't dare be rude to your employer," she told him practically.

Calling him an employer stung her tongue for a reason that was scuttling along the carpet in her half-lit room, just out of sight. She forced back the muscle movements of a frown. _'Why do I keep coming back to this?'_

A swift _tck_ at the edge of the room brought her eyes back up. He was standing with his phone closed, looking at them with an expression that was struggling to be apathetic and failing. As his eyes flickered from Toshio to her, she put her free hand on her husband's shoulder pointedly.

Kaiba's eyes narrowed imperceptibly, as if to say _'You think so, do you?'_

But once again, she didn't know what he was asking her for.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Toshio was laughing in a restaurant expensive enough to have normally reduced him to nervous warbling, and loudly enough that she was instantly aware that he'd had too much to drink.

He was also talking too loudly, but for once, Seto Kaiba seemed to be the only one who didn't mind.

Toshio's wide, square-toothed mouth was smiling at her again, and she didn't bother not to sigh or look embarrassed, fully aware that the only person for whom that mattered- and who would believe it anyway- was inebriated beyond noticing. He threw an arm around her waist affectionately, seemingly oblivious to his employer's sudden sharpness of expression.

"_Jen_, don't be embarrassed," he teased her, voice mellowed to evenness by his drinking. She made a point of looking at the rich dark foreign woods making up the bulk of the décor. Her pointed inattention shifted his to their reticent companion. "She's not usually this quiet," he told him confidentially, "but neither is she normally so clumsy."

He was laughing loudly enough that she was having a great deal of trouble not wanting to hit him. She felt his long arm squeeze her waist, pulling her closer, albeit inadvertently. Regardless of her earlier assertions of ownership, the soft teak insets in the wall panelling seemed much less likely to aggravate her sensibilities, and she kept her eyes on them.

"I've never seen you drop anything before," he said warmly, and she felt his finger push a loose half-curl of hair behind her ear. She couldn't help but turn to him, pushing his widely gesticulating hand down. He leaned his forehead against hers, smiling in a way that she found begrudgingly impossible to be angry with. "But I'm glad you aren't upset."

She smiled weakly back at him, resisting the need to pull back from the contact of his hot and faintly sweating skin. She could see Kaiba in her peripheral vision, watching them with no pretence of subtlety or joy, and refilling Toshio's glass before his or her own.

She felt a sudden surge of peevish anger at him, and then stilled.

_'Holy Christ,'_ she realized suddenly, _'This is more awkward than I could have made it incidentally.'_

She pushed Toshio off gently, and he grimaced. "Oh, um," he muttered, seemingly strangely back to his characteristic indecision for a moment. He jerked up to his feet. "Please excuse me."

He all but ran to the stairs before she could even protest.

_'How fucking fantastic,'_ he subconscious told her, inviting itself, unwanted, into her thoughts. _'Your ex-lover just fed your husband wine to the point of forceful digestive expulsion. What a perfect moment for your long-planned heart-to-heart.'_

She told her subconscious to go fuck itself, and that she had very little intention of talking about anything more complex than the fascinating quality of the teak insets in the décor.

She rose. "I should go make sure my husband is alright," she told him decisively. It came out with a biting edge she hadn't intended.

He swept a hand forward, inviting her to sit back down. "You should," he told her contradictorily.

She sat back down, ostensibly just because she didn't really feel like seeing if Toshio was alright, anyway.

Kaiba regarded her silently. After about a minute, she concluded that he had no intention of saying anything.

She looked back at him. _'Well, Toshio's not here, so it doesn't matter.'_

"Giving me the silent treatment doesn't disguise the fact that you don't know what to say," she told him abruptly.

His reaction wasn't quite what she'd hoped for. He looked more pleased than anything else.

He was almost smiling. Almost. "You certainly haven't changed."

She considered throwing her soup spoon at him for no better reason than that she wanted to, but didn't for the better reason that that would just prove his point. "That's a hasty assumption," she rebutted instead.

Now he really was smiling, if only a little. "It's an assertion, and one you've failed to disprove."

She wondered if he'd always been so pointedly annoying. "It's a theory, certainly, and one you've provided no proofs for," she argued. Something in her subconscious told her to shut up and sit back, and she told it that its advice very rarely did her any good in any situation, anyway. "Without proofs, your assumption, assertion, and theoretical pretension is victim to inherent fallacy," she explained, gesturing dismissively. "Blindly implementing an untested formula and hoping the unsolved numbers present themselves is a little… _oh._"

_'Shit.'_

She fidgeted.

"Well, that didn't help my case," she admitted reluctantly. She wondered why she couldn't seem to speak without betraying herself, and then remembered that her original solution had just been to speak less. Kaiba was just looking at her with a pleasant, unreadable expression. She gave up and glowered at him. "If you're looking for answers, you'll be disappointed," she told him. He just kept looking at her silently, chin propped on his fist. She fidgeted again. "The décor is nice here."

He smiled at her again. Now he was almost laughing at her. "I know."

It was hard not to think about it, but thinking about it was the last thing she wanted to do. _'Too much,'_ she told her subconscious. For once, it just shrugged amicably.

She was trying not to chew her nails. She was trying not to stare him down. She'd never conquered the first habit, but she'd thought she'd conquered the second.

"Saito went to the press," he said abruptly.

She blinked. "The Law teacher?"

He inclined his head affirmatively. Her life suddenly felt a little more surreal.

For another moment, he watched her in silence. "It's lucky you took his name," he said ambiguously. She didn't miss the emphasis. "You're something of a media obsession."

She swallowed. She wasn't sure if it was heavy guilt or sick unease that was pushing down on her stomach. "When?"

"About a month after. Two week after full release."

It was definitely guilt. She couldn't meet his eyes. "I didn't know. I'm surprised they didn't find me." He didn't have to answer that for her to know that he'd had a part in that. She pushed the remnants of her food around on her plate with her finger before realizing that that was probably inappropriate behaviour for a twenty-four year old in public. "How's urban legend status?"

He laughed, but it was through his teeth. "Horrific. Every woman I meet believes that they can see through my _icy façade _and heal my deep emotional wounds," he said drily.

She raised her eyebrows unsympathetically. "How _terrible_ for you."

They were quiet again. She wondered what was talking Toshio so long, and a felt a vague twinge of concern. She reached for her wineglass, only to realize that Kaiba had shifted it surreptitiously out of easy reach. She looked at him.

"How's Mokuba?" She heard her mouth say it, and winced.

He smiled wryly. "Eighteen." He glanced over at the waiter who had come to hover expectantly. The waiter left hastily. "He misses you."

It was her subconscious that reach out and grabbed her tongue and stopped her from asking _"Do you?"_ and she blessed its crooked little heart. The last thing she needed was to make things more complicated than they were. "I miss him, too," she admitted.

His expression did something strange and convulsive that she didn't understand.

She tried to smile at him. "Jealous?" she teased, and then slapped herself inwardly for being unnecessarily cruel.

"Of course."

He wasn't smiling anymore.

She realized that, honouring a long, established tradition of her own, she'd lit the wrong wick.

She had just enough time to think _'oh, no' _before her subconscious shut her out again, presumably because even it didn't want to hang around to watch her fist dynamite.

"Of course I'm jealous," he told her again. The delicate rice-paper shades on the hanging lights lent a yellow- _'daylight, like late noon'_- cast across the table and his face. She once again found herself amazed at how little he'd changed. Even his immaculate hairstyle was the same. His narrowed eyes, watching her, still looked luminously grey in the shadow cast from his eyelashes. "Of all the people in the world, you chose _Nakamura_."

She didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't as thought she could deny it.

He'd given up on looking apathetic, and was sitting with his chin still on his fist and his teeth half-bared in a sort of frustrated but forcibly predatory patience. "I suppose I should be grateful," he said wryly.

She couldn't do anything but stare at him, bewildered. _'Where is this going?'_

"While I can't account for your taste," he told her, eyes flickering momentarily over her shoulder and back, "finding myself incapable of respecting your idiot of a husband helps."

She knew how to react to that. His statement brought up a comforting surge of anger. "Excuse me for not fulfilling your expectations of me," she retorted bitingly. "You may very well feel grateful; My 'idiot of a husband' and I will gladly disappear from your _Lordly presence_," she was snarling, but sensibly considered that his fault, "as soon as your business with him is completed." She pushed again the little black door, trying to calm herself. She failed. "You can go back to your _horrific_ existence of having such _pitiably common_ women throw themselves at your _royal feet_, and injurious I will retreat back to my Western hovel of peasantry, no one the wiser to interrupt your tormented existence."

His mouth was pulled in a closed half-smile that she didn't like. "Really."

For a reason that was still escaping her, it was a statement rather than a question.

"Really," she affirmed impatiently and went to stand. _'I should find Toshio.'_

"You misunderstand. Your being married to Nakamura is an unexpectedly good thing."

She stopped to look at him suspiciously, still half-crouched over her seat.

"He's unlikely to find more stable or respectable employment," he told her. His face was blank with politeness, but his voice had taken on a familiar lilt. "Considering your unwillingness to enlighten him as to the nature of your discomfort, you'll find the lure of steady work more compelling than that of enduring inexplicable moodiness." His mask of politeness was breaking down into an all-too-familiar expression of smugness. "I can keep your husband here indefinitely, if I like," he said with deceptive softness. His eyes were still narrowed, but they were paired with an expression of brows-raised amusement.

He was insufferably satisfied by her frozen reaction, and she could tell. "For all intents and purposes, I own your husband," he told her quietly.

She could see Toshio making his way back from the corner of her eye, his hand still lingering over his mouth.

She thought about denying it. She considered feigning indifference.

As usual, she spoke before she'd decided what to say, and it was with a humiliating tone of amazement.

"I hate you _so fucking much_."

He didn't look particularly perturbed.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	5. Chapter 5

_**Note: **__Drunk Kiski says, in an informative stupor: __**WandererRaen**__, nothing makes me happier than making you happier. (I had to correct this like… fifteen times. Times was spelt with a 'u'!)_

_This has been a public service announcement on the evils of drinking wine on Monday nights._

_By the way, this entire story becomes both hilarious and impossible to take seriously if you listen to Alanis Morisette's __**You Oughta Know**__ at any time during the proceedings._

_IMPOSSIBLE._

_This chapter might take like six years to write because I can't take myself seriously anymore. _

_Edit: It's official. Only you still love me, __**WandererRaen**__. One review, guys? Ouch._

_Double-Edit: Violence and profanity is ALWAYS the answer._

_Jennifer says: __**I knew you missed me!**_

_Post-Posting-Edit: Fixed some bullshit errors; point out any others to me if you see them, okay?_

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Five_

Her short, thick hair was so translucent that the harsh track lighting in the lab made it the glowing halo painted on portraits of dead saints. Despite her similarly colourless cheeks, the seemingly inerasable dark smudges under her eyes lent her a more human aspect.

Human or otherwise, Jennifer had never looked more at home than perched on a stool with her skyscraper heels clicking against the stool's legs, talking animatedly with the older members of his design team, her back to her husband, he himself talking more sedately with the younger members in the corner.

Seto Kaiba couldn't suppress a smile for numerous reasons.

The first was- judging by his puzzled eyes flicking back and forth between the male and female counterparts of the Nakamura marriage- that Jii Tokigawa was obviously puzzling over why it was Toshio Nakamura working for them, and not the instantly more interested Jennifer, who seemed, from her rapid gesturing and pointing, to be asking a thousand questions at once.

The second reason was that Kaiba himself suspected that the male counterpart of the Nakamura marriage had clued in to the fact that everyone around him tended less towards abusive behaviour when his wife was there.

He assumed that that was why she was lurking in the development lab a full hour before the team was due to clock out and gather with the rest of the programming staff- plus extraneous spouses and dates- for their celebratory dinner. _'No thanks due you, Nakamura,'_ he thought uncharitably, considering the number of times he'd had to rewrite the man's contract with distaste. _'At least I'll finally have my monsters.' _

The light was playing tricks with the long shadow under Jennifer's bangs.

Nakamura was correct about something _unrelated_ to graphics design for once, which did amuse him and put him in a better mood.

Having Jennifer there did make him want to treat the young artist better, though not for any particularly kind motives.

She kept slipping up, and judging from his increasingly nervous manner, her husband was starting to notice. Her occasionally violent, consistently absurd attitude tended to peek through when she was aggravated, and nothing aggravated her more than his intruding on something- _'someone, __**someone**__, not something'- s_he considered hers.

She'd spotted him, and retreated into her _good wife, I'm such a good, calm, submissive wife_ attitude.

He hated it. It was so surreal, watching her dip her head when she smiled and listening to her speak so softly, fingers laced innocently in her lap.

She was a loud, obnoxious person. She had, from what he'd gathered, always been a loud, obnoxious person. He honestly hadn't thought she had the capability to act as though she wasn't.

He was doggedly determined to find out how long she could before she snapped completely.

Her husband had spotted him too, and stumbled around the computer banks to catch when he started to approach her.

"_Mister_ Kaiba," he greeted in his jointed Nakamura_ patois_, as always too eager. "You're accompanying us to the dinner?"

He seemed more nervous than usual. There was a particular high-strung note in his manner of speaking that made Kaiba stop to look at him. His eyes were held so wide that the white was showing around his irises. _'Are you still frightened of me, herbivore?'_ he wondered whimsically, and didn't bother to suppress a wry sneer. "I am the creator of this project and host of this dinner," he told him flatly. _'I do happen to have an interest in the happiness of my workers, as a result.'_

Nakamura was floundering, drowning in his own profusion of words again. Kaiba waited impatiently for him to stop blabbering emptily.

Jennifer's low, whooping laugh cut the conversation. Nakamura looked up, startled. Kaiba turned to look.

She was holding her stomach and trying not to fall off of the stool simultaneously. One of her pumps had slipped off and was lying on its side on the floor, but she didn't seem to have noticed.

Jii Tokigawa was smiling in a goofy way that was wholly unfamiliar. He looked a little as though he was considering adoption.

Kaiba wondered if the design team head had finally told his incomprehensible C++ programming joke to the one person in the world who would actually find it funny.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He'd finished his speech.

He liked company dinners. His own employees rarely hounded him like the 'guests' at a press release.

Jennifer was rolling her foot forwards and backwards, clicking her heel on the floor.

She was visibly annoyed to be back in the same oppressively expensive restaurant as she'd been in just two days before. He could see her shooting him sceptical glances.

_'Are you trying to make me uncomfortable?' _they asked. _'You should know me better than that.'_

She was wearing something very similar to the lace dress he'd seen her in before- _'and more than once; but now that you know he's seen it her in it, what will you do?'-_ but in a rich bluish shade of violet. He wondered if that was to make him uncomfortable, and shot her a look in turn. He didn't know how honest her confidence was, but he was finding the impatient clicking of her left heel on the hardwood distracting. _'Among other things,'_ he thought more actively, and frowned. One of the programmers side-stepped hastily out of his way.

Nakamura jumped when he sat in the chair across from him. Jennifer didn't look surprised. She smiled sweetly at him, fingers laced appropriately in her lap but shoulders stiff and square against the back of her chair. The neck of her dress was higher than he'd realized. Knowing her sometimes oddly purposeful nature, he wondered if that meant anything.

He smiled at her. The male counterpart of the Nakamura couple smiled before the female one pulled her mouth in an awkward antisocial half-sneer. _'I have very little desire to be here,'_ it said. He could hear his design team head half-heartedly berating someone who'd spilt a glass of wine. Jennifer threw that design team's table a longing look that was impossible to miss.

"How do you like your husband's workplace?" he needled, admittedly nettled by her polite, dismissive posture. Nakamura began to answer, but Jennifer's palm settled over his hand mid-word, and he stopped and turned his face towards her, clearly curious.

The overhead light was darkening the circles under her eyes into feathery black shadows from her eyelashes.

"It's very respectable," she deadpanned. Her voice didn't match her pointedly polite face.

He admired her restraint, but not enough to stop.

"With the economy the way it is, it's certainly beneficial for everyone involved that talented workers find stable employment," he said, sending a glowing Nakamura a smile that was supposed to be charming but ended up feeling rather stiff. "Your patience with his unusual work hours is commendable," he complimented drily.

He'd expected her to retort in like or express annoyance, but she just looked confused.

Nakamura barged into the conversation.

"We really appreciate your enthusiasm," he said hastily, "but I still need to consider my options; As generous as your offer is, I'm sure you know that both my wife and I miss home very much." He threw his arm around her shoulders with a look of hesitant affection.

Judging from the white-haired _Mrs. _Nakamura's resumed stiffness and sudden look of offense, she hadn't had his offer of a contract extension imparted to her. "Oh, Toshio," she interrupted. Her voice was normal now, delicately maintaining sweet surprise, but she had her jaw visibly clenched and one shoulder raised defensively inside his embrace. "You didn't mention that…" she was looking for words, but just stopped. Kaiba smiled at her raised-brows and tight-lipped look of challenge.

It was strangely cute.

"I doubt you'll find a more suitable position," he said, more to her than her husband.

She kicked him under the table. He laughed. He couldn't help it.

Nakamura looked like his world making surrealist nightmares had just gotten a little bit more surreal than average.

"Jennifer?"

Jennifer paused in the middle of trying to step on his foot. He could feel the front of her shoe rock forwards as she started to tap her heel nervously again.

"It _is_ you!"

He'd forgotten that Mokuba was attending.

They spoke so little that he'd also completely forgotten to mention to Mokuba that Jennifer was back.

Jennifer turned slowly and hesitantly, like someone who'd just been supplanted from normal life into a particularly bizarre soap opera.

It was probably fairly accurate.

He would have been insulted that Mokuba was better prepared to provoke an honest reaction from her if the results weren't so bafflingly hilarious.

She'd reverted to too loud, too flabbergasted. "When did you get so fucking _tall?_"

Mokuba laughed.

Jennifer had her hands over her mouth.

Nakamura was staring at her in shocked puzzlement.

Before he had time to say anything, Mokuba's late-teen impulsiveness took the situation by storm.

She shrieked a little when he hoisted out of her chair like a doll, laughing, and gave her a broad hug. Her expression of confusion deepened. She kept holding her hand at eye level and then raising it as far up as she could reach and bringing it down again. "How?" she asked, looking a little like a lost child in a supermarket. "You… you've… you're turning into your_ brotherrrr…_" she wailed, hands pressed to sides of her head.

Toshio Nakamura looked terrified. "Jennifer…?"

She made a loud sound through her teeth at him that was not unlike tearing paper. He jerked back in his seat.

Mokuba was laughing.

"What the _fuck_ is this?"

His imitation of the moment wasn't.

Kaiba hadn't known she was coming.

He didn't remember her being that much taller than the original, either.

'_Oh,'_ he thought, as the imitation towered over her, heels included.

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded. "Who the fuck is she?" Mokuba waved her aside dismissively, and she grabbed at his arm. "You, don't ignore me!"

Jennifer Nakamura _née_ Nauswell still had her hands pressed to her head in frantic confusion when Mokuba's girlfriend starting yelling at her. The rest of the restaurant had gone silent, just staring.

"It's… _too loud_," she said vaguely, and shoved the girl back by the face with her palm. The brunette slapped her hand away aggressively.

"Do you have something to fucking _say_ to me, cunt?" she snarled. Jennifer was staring up at her with a wholly unfocused expression he found all too familiar.

"Hamburgers," she said intently to the girl's bony chest, and picked up her husband's wine. Before anyone could react to the contrary- if anyone had felt the urge or obligation, anyway- she pulled out the scalloped neckline of the girl's dress and poured the wine inside it with an expression of such serious concentration that he couldn't control his laughter.

Nakamura was edging forward again, half-standing out of his seat.

Jennifer whirled to look at him, wineglass still in hand. She set it carefully on the table and then pointed at him, wild-eyed. All she said was, _"__**Toshio**__," _but with such intensity that it seemed to the casual observer as though she was scolding a dog. She pointed to his chair.

He sat.

Mokuba looked confused at the sight of him. "Wait, what?"

Jennifer took off her shoes, ignoring both the curious young man and the screaming girl beside her, and gathered them primly in one hand.

"Excuse me," she said calmly.

"_Excuse_ you?" Mokuba's girlfriend shrieked, shoving at her, and then at Mokuba when he tried to interfere.

Jennifer's expression was purely unhinged. "I will throw these at you," she said seriously, eyes still overbright and wild. "At _your face_."

Mokuba grabbed the imitation's hands carefully. "She will."

"Excuse me, I must visit the powder room," Jennifer repeated. Her face and voice had become strangely over-expressive, like she was in a character play. "My brain is leaking out of my ears."

She trotted away barefoot as though it was perfectly normal in a restaurant where the floor-lacquer was mirror-bright.

Mokuba laughed in the dead-silent room.

"It's nice to see that you haven't changed, Jennifer," he called.

Kaiba didn't look forward to telling him exactly why she was back.

Toshio Nakamura looked like he was about to soil himself with mixed bafflement and terror.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He was itching for a chance to _immerse_.

He hadn't had the opportunity since he'd stumbled on Jennifer being married to his haphazard graphic artist. He'd been busy vacillating between treating Nakamura horribly and trying to pressure him into extending his contract.

Mokuba hadn't taken the news that Jennifer was married to him very well.

He wondered if _AppSpo_ missed their haphazard adventures.

He knew that he did. _'Not that I'd admit that to him.'_

He was pretty sure Mokuba's antagonism towards the handsome young artist now exceeded his own.

He wondered what _AppSpo_ would think of the cave system's monsters when he saw them and then dismissed that.

_AppSpo_ liked everything, all of the time. _'Especially me.'_ He wasn't sure if that made him uncomfortable.

He wondered if Mokuba had thought far enough ahead to realize that driving away Nakamura would drive away Jennifer, too.

He frowned at himself. _'There are too many things happening at once in my head right now.'_

He clicked his laptop closed and the door to his office slammed open.

Tokigawa was standing with members of the company's security team. His face was tight and ashen with stress.

The security members nodded at his glance. He crossed hastily to the desk. "Kaiba-sama," he said, voice low and urgent. "I don't mean to alarm you, but Masao Hamada and Seiji Fujimoto from my design team have been missing since last night." He paused, looking over his shoulder at the security, one of which who was leaning around the door, presumably to look at Yuuna. The young guard stopped and straightened at the team head's disapproving look. "One of the security team, Minoru Ueda, is missing as well. Ueda and Hamada both lived in company lodging, but neither of them were seen coming home last night. Fujimoto's sister, with whom he lives, says he never made it back either, but his car is gone."

Tokigawa paused in a nervous way that he knew was bad. He could hear someone talking in hushed, hurried tones with his secretary. Jii clenched his jaw and smoothed a hand over his face. Before he could speak, a sudden scuffle at the door set the older man whirling around and out of his line of sight.

She looked livid.

"What did you do?" she demanded. The younger guard was pulling her out of the doorway insistently. He raised a hand to stop him. As the guard's hands opened reluctantly from around her arms, Kaiba could see that the skin was still white from tight constriction.

An uneasy conclusion was forming in his mind. "What are you accusing me of, _Mrs._ Nakamura?"

A flit of confusion and suspicion danced across her face. He marvelled at her resilience against the sheer amount of wine she'd resorted to the night before.

"My husband went out to get my cigarettes last night and never came back," she said cautiously.

He felt his eyebrows shoot up. "I thought you didn't smoke."

"I didn't four years ago," she snapped frankly. "Where is Toshio?"

He almost wanted to laugh. It was perfect. Weirdly, bizarrely, exquisitely perfect. For a moment, he'd entertained the paranoid thought that Mokuba had done something outrageous, but he knew his own brother better than that.

The room had started swimming in a weird surreal haze.

"If I'm hearing this correctly," he told her, resigning himself to the fact that she was probably going to throw something at him in response, "your husband may be involved in a money laundering scheme."

She didn't throw anything. She looked disgusted. She also looked largely unconvinced. "My husband is an idiot," she told him, deadpan. "You know that. Besides, we have a joint account. I'd know. I handle all of our finances."

She was standing in front of a wall sconce, and her hair looked like white fire. It almost seemed to be moving and flickering to him.

"And how did you manage that?" he asked, feeling both curious and blackly humoured.

"I told him I had a friend who was an accountant." She glanced at the guards. "Are all these people necessary?"

The room was swimming with sharks.

"Yes," he said. "These people are related to three other employees that mysteriously disappeared last night."

Her expression went tight with shocked disbelief. "But that's impossible." Her eyes were moving independently of her face. He wondered why. He realized that he hadn't slept since she'd strolled barefoot back into his life.

Three days.

_'Ah,'_ he thought. _'I remember this feeling.'_

He had the remarkable thought that sometimes, his real life was more surreal than his virtual one.

_(No Evidence Available)_

_Post-Chapter Note: For the love of God, please review. Radio silence depresses me; feedback makes me update fasterrrr. _


	6. Chapter 6

_**Note:**__ Of course I know that you love me, __**WandererRaen**__, it's not like you're subtle about it. (And eking out a little bit of creative pride from your enthusiastic and in-depth reviews is what keeps me rolling.) The worst thing is that I have like… eight subscribers, and every new chapter gets thirty or so visitors independently of the rest of the story, so I know there are people following along. It's just very frustrating. Nice to see you again, __**justheretoreadff**__! I'm glad people actually read my author's notes, too. I didn't really think anybody did._

_Edit: I feel loved again. _

_Double-Edit: Very loved! And very about to update! Hope you like this one, folks, it's almost 3 A.M. and I have get up in four hours and work for nine!_

_You'd better enjoy thissss. _

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Six_

He'd always immersed because his virtual life was, and always had been, infinitely more sane and orderly than his real one. Before Jennifer had come clawing and swearing in his life, when she'd been in it, and before she had left; his life had still never been particularly smooth.

Even after she'd left, he'd never immersed because reality felt less real than virtual reality.

It was an extremely strange sensation.

The instant he loaded in, something rang the side of his helmet like a gong. Bouncing off of his shoulder, it hit the ground with an unenthusiastic _splat _and half-sank in the mud. _'Oh,'_ he realized. The rainy season had reached its tumultuous peak. He could barely see his feet. He could feel himself starting sink and slide in the heavy, gelatinous mud, and realized that that was probably as good a reason as the heavy rain.

He stooped to grab the fallen object before shuffling forward blindly. He tried to wipe the mud free of it as he walked, head bent, object held close, but the stiff plates of his gauntlets weren't suited to the delicate task, and the rain had the some thick opacity as the rivers.

The mud was thick. He could feel it coating his legs, and it pulled at him as surely as if it had been waist-deep. A spark of concern lit in his mind. _'How am I going to find my way in this? I should have loaded out in the city.'_

Something else hit his back and clung. He grabbed for it, certain that another of his team's horrific monsters had taken the opportunity.

_AppSpo_'s womanish shrieking was familiar enough to stop him from throwing him out of sight.

The American scrabbled at the fingers of his gauntlet uncomfortably, trying to loosen the grip around his skinny arm. Kaiba sighed and hoisted him back up onto his shoulders. _"Don't do that,"_ he commanded sternly.

_AppSpo_ leaned an arm against his head, both legs over one shoulder. _"I just wanted to scare you a bit. I haven't seen you in a while." _He tapped bony fingers on his helmet. Kaiba swatted upwards at him.

He realized that he was smiling. _'At least I know what to expect from you,'_ he thought, but didn't say it aloud. Even if the scrawny moderator's frequent squirming and protruding bones made his armour ring, it had become so familiar that it was comforting.

_AppSpo_ laughed again, interrupting his musing. _"Hey. Where are you going?"_

He shrugged the shoulder the little mod was sitting on, making him shriek and grab at his helmet again. _"Anywhere that isn't entirely mud."_

_AppSpo_ waved his fingers in front of Kaiba's visor. Strangely, his normally camouflaging dark skin made them starkly visible in the thick and oddly luminous rain. _"You're going to wrong way, sir. You need to turn around. Right now, we're going towards the coast."_

He frowned inside his immersion pod. _"How do you know?"_

_AppSpo_ laughed again. _"The mud is deeper, isn't it?"_

He looked down. The mud was almost knee-deep.

He turned around, wishing all of his problems were that easily remedied.

_(No Evidence Available)_

The American liked ants and anything that passed for them.

Given the young man's normally effeminate mannerisms, he was, at first, surprised.

Remembering the warmth and enthusiasm with which he'd greeted a leech-vomit-sodden _Wandering Knight_, he stopped being surprised a moment later.

The ant den, or whatever it was officially, was dry and smooth, but mud had clotted in his joints, and _AppSpo_ was getting distracted again.

"_They're so brightly coloured,"_ he said enthusiastically, trying to coax one onto his hand.

Kaiba sighed.

_AppSpo_ looked back and then scuttled over, apologetic. _"Sorry, sir."_ He started scraping the mud out from between the plates in Kaiba's gauntlets. He forced the left one open with a grunt, sending sticky, gritty mud spitting out with grinding _splorch_. _"It didn't occur to me that you'd gotten it anywhere but on your legs,"_ he explained, shrugging.

As he forced open the right gauntlet, he peeled the object the young brunet had dug out of the mud from his hand. _"What's this?"_

Kaiba frowned. _"You didn't throw this?"_

_AppSpo_ shook his head, smoothing layers of mud off with his already gritty hands. _"No. I jumped you when I saw you. Besides, does it look like I carry a bag or any- Eugh!"_

He dropped the _Hel Flats Worm_'s distinctively jagged tooth- disturbingly, still with looked like muddied flesh attached- with a noise of horrified revulsion.

The walls of the den shuddered. Something above the ground let out something that was almost a long, gargling scream, but sounded a touch too much like wet rocks in a blender.

_AppSpo_ froze, wide-eyed, hands still raised. _"Not being on the surface right now seems like it was a very good idea,"_ he said decisively. _"You know what seems like an even better idea? Being even farther from the surface."_

He scrambled towards closest of the holes dotting the smooth walls.

Kaiba moved to stop him, a little amused by how frantic the little moderator was. _"We don't know what's down there,"_ he pointed out.

The American shook his head violently. _"If it doesn't scream like that, I'll take it."_

He slid down into the darkness like he was a part of it, holding his dark lantern above his head, its low-light metallic glitter the last to disappear.

'_Always melodramatic.' _Kaiba looked at the hole speculatively. _'And how am I going to get out of there after?'_ he mused, and then stepped into it anyway.

He'd gotten better at landing on his feet, despite the bulkiness of his characterform.

_AppSpo_ had not. Kaiba could see him faintly in the darkness, rubbing his back with obvious chagrin. He prodded him silently.

"_What?" _The American asked loudly, and then hushed. _"Oh."_

He lit his lantern.

Kaiba wondered distantly how often they were going to put themselves in the same scenario before it became obvious that dark areas were best left dark.

_AppSpo_'s cute, brightly coloured little insectoid friends were crawling over everything- the walls, the floor, the corpses- in a myriad of sizes. The pinky-finger sized ones he'd been playing with seemed somewhat less menacing than the few that were approaching waist height.

Those ones had ceased to fit into the 'cute' category.

_AppSpo_ was doing a familiar jittery dance of discomfort as the ants started to swarm closer. The insects had filled the ground between them with a carpet of bright and poisonous colours, and surging closer faster than he could slam or crush them with his heavy lantern. The meagre light it provided cast bizarre and fast-changing shadows as he swung it frantically.

Kaiba booted a big one aside, crushed another. He could feel the tiniest ones worming between the plates in his armour. He wondered what it would feel like when he failed to squish or dislodge one with his movements and it managed to slip inside.

_AppSpo_ was trying to shove through the swarm, lantern held out like a battering ram, but his tiny unathletic form wasn't suited to mastering the thick, boggy consistency of living and dead insects brewing together in a malevolent cesspool.

He tried not to think too much about the skittering sensation he could feel inside his legs as he shoved through himself.

He could feel the telltale vibrations of insistent knocking beside his head.

He grabbed for _AppSpo_. The little moderator was just out of reach.

The knocking was growing more forceful.

He grabbed for the American again, ignoring more and more ants worming under his armour.

He caught an arm and threw.

_Yggdrasill_ loaded him out before he could check his aim.

The opaque front casing of the Private Immersion Console in his work office clicked open with a soft _hiss_. He pushed it aside with a mixture of apprehension and annoyance.

Yuuna was looking in at him. Her eyes flickered from his face to the interior of the console with enough idle curiousity that he knew that the interruption wasn't for anything too serious. Behind her, the older member of the two-man security team investigating the disappearances was looking away a little bit too intently.

Contradictorily, he was in no mood for games. "Yes?"

His secretary shifted aside. The older guard bowed respectfully. "Excuse the interruption. We need your clearance to search Ueda's desk and personal locker."

He didn't have to ask to know who was causing a scene about personal privacy. Kaiba couldn't suppress a sigh. Kaiba waved a hand dismissively. "You have it. Yuuna, call human resources and tell them that I've approved it."

The older man looked instantly more at ease. Yuuna shot him a long-suffering little closed-mouth smile, eyes flickering again from his serious expression to the meticulously detailed video game console he was still sitting in.

As the door clicked closed behind them, he ran a hand through his hair, grimacing a little in embarrassment.

'_Great. My own secretary doesn't take me seriously anymore.'_

He couldn't pretend to be too upset.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He reminded himself that there were always going to be days where he spent more than sixty percent of his time at work.

Today was one of them.

His reasoning wasn't helping his mood.

Keeping rumours under control, human resources in good humour and his security team from jumping the gun and contacting the police had consumed every worn thread of patience he possessed.

Only his design team seemed to functioning better without its missing elements. Despite the artist's unexplained absence, they hadn't even discussed further delaying the update.

He stepped into his office with a restrained groan, determined to avoid his over-excitable and too-eager sibling for a least one hour of solitary peace.

The late evening sun cast monstrous shadows from the larger figures littering his desk.

He stopped halfway through the door, startled. _'Who put these here?'_

He crossed, and picked one up a smaller one between two fingers. It was incomplete, still only half-painted, but instantly recognizable. He'd seen drawings of it in Nakamura's later sketches. _'Did security find these in his desk?'_

She was sitting on the floor by the window wall, wearing her old, cheap wire-framed glasses, old jeans and no shoes, her hair uncombed and gravitating statically towards the window on the left side.

She'd lost the _good wife, I'm such a good wife_ pale peach blush and matte nude lipstick. She'd dropped the _a good wife only thinks as much as is appropriate_ look of polite uncomprehending disinterest.

She was staring sidelong at him, one socked foot working back and forth restlessly. The circles under her eyes were almost bruise-black without concealer.

"Aren't you trying to convince me that four blissful years of marriage turned you into a domestic goddess?" he asked her drily.

Jennifer just chuckled.

"Toshio's gone and you know better, anyway. I've got no one to impress."

He suppressed a chuckle of his own and went back to examining the sinuous lines of the fired clay figurine he was holding.

The room was silent for long enough that he could hear her swallow and shift uncomfortably.

"I know why Toshio left."

He looked back over at her warily. She was looking back at him, head rolled to face him more completely. He looked away again. The grotesque face of his figurine was more comforting.

Another breath of silence. Her jeans shifting on the floor, _shush shush_ing as she moved. Her breath catching a little before she spoke.

"He was stealing from me." She was trying to sound angry, but he could still hear the hurt in her voice.

'_Don't look,'_ his brain told him firmly, and he agreed.

She kept talking. She'd unstopped, and the words were coming out in a torrential staccato, like they always did. "I don't know, I keep thinking maybe he would've brought me with him if I hadn't blown up like that." It was a giggle, but not a mirthful one. "He left so suddenly, but he was bringing me around and- wait, um. Um." She swallowed again. "From the beginning."

A deep breath. The figurine looked a little bit like an anthropomorphized hagfish from certain angles.

"We worked together a little on a horror movie he'd been hired on… uh… about two years ago. He'd- typical, stupid Toshio- he'd agreed to do some clay modelling of his art for the costume people. To help with texture and proportion, he said." She giggled a little in earnest. "He'd never used the stuff, had no idea how to. Ended up coming to me a panic. So I helped. It worked." A little half-catch in her throat, disguised as a cough. "I liked it. I told him I'd done it before, and he bought me a quarter-tonne of the stuff to keep me happy when he was working. And it did."

He could feel her looking at him.

"They help with the nightmares."

She laughed wryly in the emptiness.

"I never use to be able to sleep. Now I can, a little, but I don't want to."

A breathy downwards sigh at his silence.

"He told me that he was borrowing them, just a couple at a time, because they helped inspire him for work. Never seemed too bothered about how they look, or what they might mean. He told me he was working on an architecture expansion."

He couldn't not look. She was looking at her feet, not at him. Her eyes were dry. He was grateful for that.

"I never knew. I think he might have been considering telling me before…" she gestured broadly. "Well, before. He was _so_ excited for me to meet everyone; he even invited me to the press release." She rolled her head towards him, a half-closed crooked and apologetic smile on her lips. "Then I started acting like myself."

She was still fidgeting. She looked away again, out the window. There was a note of rising anxiety in her voice.

"I really don't know why or if he left with the others," she told him flatly, "but I did find out that he opened up a new bank account under his own name about a week ago, and probably by himself, because the twit set up in the same bank with the same banker we use here for our joint account."

He didn't know what to say. He knew logically that she was volunteering information that his security team could find useful, but she'd always had a bad habit of doing things for unfathomable reasons. He waited for her to finish.

She shifted and swallowed and chewed her nails in uncomfortable silence for long enough that he considered approaching her. He realized that he was still toying with the figurine unconsciously, and put it down.

"This is really hard for me," she blurted out.

He forced down an inappropriately timed smile at the memory of the last time he'd her say something like that, and just looked at her.

She'd folded her lips in a tight line and was looking anywhere but at him. Her eyebrows were pulling together in a too-familiar expression of humiliated discomfort.

He looked at the figurines on his desk and realized that before he'd moved one, she'd placed them in a weird static concentric pattern of rings, according to size.

It occurred to him that he knew what she wanted.

He wasn't feeling generous enough to admit it. "Do you need something from me?" he asked her frankly.

Her agitated foot shaking grew worse. She didn't say anything.

He crossed his arms, fully aware that he was being unnecessarily stubborn but completely beyond caring. "I can't know what you need if you don't ask me for it."

She kicked his office chair. "Don't make me do this again," she pleaded. She still couldn't meet his eyes. She was looking out the window. He could hear her grinding her teeth in helpless frustration, and felt a twinge of guilt.

"You still have to tell me," he told her.

Her voice was stiff, begrudging.

"I like your design team."

He had to bite the side of his tongue to not chuckle at her petulant, dismissive posture. "And they like you. But can you draw?"

Jennifer was playing with one of the wheels on his chair with her feet, trying to turn it without moving the chair. She was looking sidelong at him again, obviously a little nervous.

"No, but I can give them the mathematical input for 3D modelling," she said. She almost sounded shy.

He stopped baiting her, a little startled by her casual profession.

"…That will probably do."

_(No Evidence Available)_


	7. Chapter 7

_**Note:**__ Um. Seven chapters. Seven. I have written (am writing) seven chapters._

_I wrote the first chapter just before school started in September._

_Two months, and I've written seven chapters. (20,000+ words, two months, and I've never been a NaNoWriMo girl)_

_What the Dickens, Charles Dickens, I might just be a pushing the title of weekly author, just like you back in the Victorian era. I'm nowhere near __**Great Expectations**__, but I've still amassed 60,000+ words all about the mad adventures of Jennifer Nauswell, probably even without author's notes._

_What the fuck._

_How did I become so prolific? __**When**__ did I become so prolific? None of my stories used to ever make it past chapter two!_

_Edit: __**WandererRaen**__, let's elope. D: Apparently you're the only person I don't have to hound to get a review from. _

_Double-Edit: __**kitsunekokorono**__, you can come too._

_Triple-Edit: We'll make it Mormon, __**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto**__. But with three lovely wives, well… I guess elopement is too much hassle._

_Quad-Edit: Excuse me while I pee myself laughing at my own jokes. Also, this chapter is crazy fucking long. _

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Seven_

He didn't like receiving reports from the chauffeurs that Mokuba Kaiba had once again 'opted to walk'.

As a general rule, that meant that his little brother was 'opting' not to attend his classes at the university, despite the amount of money he'd poured into it for books and tuition. The brunet had tried his best to be good, to be patient; even when Mokuba was at his worst, he hadn't ever considered denying funding his education. He hadn't even questioned his choice of major, though he suspected the teen's interest in honours philosophy had more to do with the starkly biased male-to-female ratio of Arts students- about 1:5- than any real aspirations. He'd benevolently allowed Mokuba to stop working part-time at the company, on the flimsy-at-best basis that he needed time for homework.

Seto Kaiba had tried desperately to be good.

He'd been patient. He'd been calm. He'd waited unfalteringly for Mokuba to grow up and realize that the world revolved around more than feeling betrayed and abandoned by someone he'd known for less than six months; intimately, less than two.

He had, apparently incorrectly, assumed that Mokuba's deviant behaviour would correct itself when that happened.

Unexpectedly, the original problem had corrected itself- _'in a way- nothing's been resolved- I still don't know __**why**__'_- by way of her return, and his brother was once again speaking to him as though four years of steadily mounting belligerence and increasingly malicious pranks had never happened.

He was trying not to have a problem with that. He disliked that his own brother was taking the same _"It never happened, nothing happened, you can't blame me for something that never happened" _approach as Jennifer. He was having enough difficulty dealing with her absolute refusal to admit that there was ever an existing situation in which a problem could have developed without having to shutter away resentment at his own brother for the same thing.

All Jennifer had had to do was come back. She had. With Nakamura's conveniently timed disappearance, the one issue that he had been actively seething over had vanished. The lack of communication he was receiving was aggravating, but not an unsolvable problem; she had a tendency to blabber about personal things when she was upset. He assumed that it would all come out in due time, if he stretched his patience just a little further.

Mokuba had not corrected his behaviour. He did not simply have to be within reaching distance. Where _she_ had unexpectedly pleased him by easily replacing her missing husband, his brother was still maintaining his_ laissez-faire _attitude towards work and school- though, mercifully, he'd abandoned his rather embarrassing quest to interrupt the lives of every green-eyed or green-contacted brunette in a three district radius.

Kaiba rubbed his hands over his face. Both his stomach and his skull felt leaden from trying to think about too much at once. He leaned back from his computer and set Genjikou Industrial's invitation aside. The light was coming through the window at a particular low angle that he recognized as meaning that he hadn't left his office in hours- again.

She'd left one of her figurines lurking in the shadow of his inbox.

He suppressed the smile out of habit before remembering that he was alone.

Kaiba rolled his shoulders back, wincing at the sharp _ppt-crk _of his spine realigning. His legs were numb from sitting. He frowned speculatively at the door. He needed to clear his head. He really _could_ use a walk.

It wasn't unreasonable for him to check up on a new staff member, either.

And he did have to return her work to her.

_(No Evidence Available)_

His team greeted him with the euphoric enthusiasm of those in the midst of thinking '_oh thank God that's over'._

He assumed that had something to do with the sudden release of pressure that came with the finalization of the _Helheim _cave expansion.

The development lab looked gapingly empty. Without the constant stressed inflow and outflow of programmers checking last-minute details, and with Nakamura and two of his design team gone unexpectedly, the room had gone from full and bustling to containing four relatively quiet, darkly dressed people huddled together in a swamp of the whites and greys of high-powered lighting and chrome finish. It was only the stool seats and the keyboards that were black, dotting and dashing the room like Morse code.

Jii Tokigawa looked happy to have things back to comparatively normal. He beckoned his employer over eagerly, worn, lined face alight with a strange sort of almost possessed inspiration.

He approached obediently and looked over his shoulder.

It appeared that Jennifer's method of mathematical artistry was compatible with his team's working style.

His design team head was palpably ecstatic. "I would not have suggested it as a possibility because of the time and labour I assumed was involved, Kaiba-sama," he said warmly, rotating the figure on the screen leisurely, "but having a three-dimensional model of the subject on hand is extremely helpful. Not having to calculate proportion from perspective drawings…" Tokigawa just looked up at him, shaking his head. "It's unbelievable."

From the older man's manner, Kaiba gathered two implicit statements.

The first was _"Yes, Jennifer is fitting in quite well."_

The second was _"Where were you keeping her when we needed her?"_

He looked around for the subject in question, suddenly aware that she wasn't in sight. He was still having difficulty fully comprehending that she worked for him; a large part of his brain hadn't expected her to be there, and therefore simply hadn't noticed when she wasn't.

Tokigawa caught on to his searching gaze. He smiled in a strangely provocative way.

"We've set up the adjacent storage room for her to work in and moved all of the equipment in into Programming's storage; unfortunately, it seems that modelling produces a much larger mess than traditional art," he said wrly. He was silent for a moment. "She's been here a lot," he commented. Tokigawa's eyes unusually focused on his face, watching his reactions carefully. Kaiba kept his face politely inexpressive. "I think she likes being here better than she likes going home."

There was an odd knowing lilt to his low voice, an older man's wise glint in his eye. Tokigawa was half-smiling, still watching him speculatively.

Kaiba sighed. "Are you implying something?" he asked frankly.

The design team head ducked a smile to the side. "Nothing at all, sir." As Kaiba turned to investigate his new employee's workspace, Tokigawa spoke from behind him.

"I just couldn't help but notice that some that there seems to be some familiarity in your behaviour towards each other." He paused. Kaiba could hear the amusement in his voice. "It also seems like a remarkable coincidence that she shares both her first and her maiden name with the somewhat infamous _Jennifer Nauswell_."

Kaiba grimaced.

Of course his staff would know, regardless of age. The Public Relations department had been in a nigh-orgasmic state for months over the manic press attention they'd received. They'd even tried to convince him to find a stand-in to stage a heart-rending and wildly tumultuous reunion, convinced that it would win the company the interest of the female demographic- girl gamers and the mothers of young potential consumers.

He had not opted for that.

He had no intention of tipping off his P.R. department to the fact that the actual person had returned, even if the reality was much more in the vein of sedate confusion and unexpected surprises and not deeply emotive whinging.

He trusted Tokigawa knew inherently that his conclusion was not to be spoken of. He assumed his silence was enough of a confirmation to its truth.

Judging from the older man's barely-audible chortle fading behind him as he walked away, he was correct.

The door to the storage room was secreted away in the corner for a reason; the storage room was perpetually dirty, and even the outside of the door reflected that. It had previously only been dust and loose fibres from protective packaging clinging to the discreetly painted wood, but now the doorknob was smudged with the tell-tale matte red-brown of fresh clay.

He opened it carefully, feeling the modelling material slide under his palm, still faintly warmer than the metal.

A voice slid out sinuously between the doorjamb and the door.

He realized where Mokuba had 'opted' to go instead of to his class.

The heavy metal shelving in the room was largely bare, but she'd stacked and organized her unused materials tightly together on the three levels by the door. Kaiba pulled the door closed behind him as silently as possible.

As it took, the tongue of the latch made a tiny _ff-tck_ in the silence between speakers. He kept still, listening to see if they had heard.

Jennifer, at least, had not.

"Mokuba," she started, and then sighed. Her voice sounded amused, but breathy with exasperation. "Mokuba. Can you pass me the curved tool beside you? No, the smaller one." The was a small scrape and a clatter which he assumed was the action being performed.

His little brother did not sound amused. "Were you listening to me at all?"

A quick _tck-tck-tck _of quickly moving shoes on the tile and a half-hummed sound of indifference. He had a sudden vivid mental image of her scooting foot-over-foot around him in his kitchen, just out of arm's reach, smiling stiffly as though nothing was wrong. He frowned. _'What did Mokuba do to merit that?'_

He could only see the barest glimpses of the room past her still-sealed tubs of clay, resealed enamel paints and neat layout of toolkits and brushes- by size before function, of course, he thought amusedly. He saw a brief flash of white and sank back further behind the shelves, reluctant to be seen.

"Listening to what? I don't believe I heard you say anything." There was a note of teasing in her words, but he recognized the colder undertone: _'Let it go. Now.'_

Mokuba didn't seem to have caught it. "Don't mess around, Jen." He demanded quietly. It was low, but challenging.

Kaiba fought back a wince of paranoia. _'Jen?'_

The 'Jen' referred to didn't seem to know either. "Jen?" she asked. A little, genuinely amused laugh echoed in the largely empty room. A heavy _schloop_ of new or extra clay going down on the counter. "Since when have I been Jen?" Another little laugh, a little harder, and a startled noise from his brother. "You deserved that. Don't worry; it'll come out. Now, what weren't we talking about? I hear your girlfriend broke up with you. Hope I didn't have too much of a hand in that."

She didn't sound particularly wracked with guilt.

"Don't change the subject," his brother said sharply. Kaiba couldn't suppress the observation that he was starting to sound remarkably petulant and sulky. "Jen." Kaiba heard her shoes _tck-tck-tck_ again as she minced. "Jennifer," he said more firmly. She stopped. "I'm not kidding."

Her sigh was so heavy that he could almost hear the wind passing through the bronchi and bronchioles of her lungs. The _tck-tck-tck_ changed into a rapid _tp-tp-tp-tp-tp_, and he knew she'd started tapping her foot in an anxious beat.

"You should be kidding," she said, so obviously exasperated that he could almost taste it in the dry, still air. "This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous, Mokuba Kaiba. You have _become_ a ridiculous person." She laughed again, but it was heavy with disbelief. "I don't even know what to tell you. _Vous dites des bêtises." _

"At least tell me why you left," Mokuba demanded, audibly frustrated.

"We've been through this. _Ask me no questions…_"

The youngest Kaiba sounded distinctly as though he were at his wits' end. "_Stop _saying that."

Kaiba suppressed a wry, nostalgic smile. He made himself comfortable, leaning against the wall. _'You, dearest brother,'_ he thought, genuinely amused, _'have no idea of the level of frustration that you are asking for.'_

It was obvious that he didn't, because if he had- like any sane person- he would have stopped there and saved himself a lot of unnecessary anger and confusion.

_'How does that reflect on my sanity?'_ The brunet wondered idly as Mokuba struggled to find his words. It occurred to him to wonder how long they'd been going around in circles, as well.

"Jennifer." Kaiba perked, attending. Mokuba was trying again. "I need you to understand." Her shoes were skittering away again across the tile. "Jennifer. I'm serious. I love you. Really."

He froze, dumbfounded. _'What?'_ The previously moderate room suddenly seemed stiflingly hot. _'What am I listening to?'_

A long, hissing sigh through her teeth that said _'For Christ's sakes, enough.'_

"No," she said firmly, though he could tell she was trying to maintain her light humour. "No, not really. No, you don't love me. You think you do, and- _Look at me, _Mokuba_._" She no longer sounded amused, just breathy with exasperation. "I didn't know what love was when I was eighteen. Your brother didn't know what love was when _he_ was eighteen. You, certainly, of all people, _do not know_ what love is."

He couldn't blame Mokuba for sounding particularly offended. "What the hell do you mean, me 'of all people'?"

"Just shut up and listen. I know your family in general is spectacularly bad at that, but try to bear with me." From the hasty scraping and half-solid thudding of what sounded like the soles of her shoes against wood, he guessed that she'd hoisted herself up onto her work table, characteristically disregarding the mess. "I like you, Mokuba. _Really,_" she said drily. "But your brother spoils you, and he has always let you get away with entirely too much bullshit." She was being brutally frank. Kaiba could feel his face starting to burn in response. "For once, I'm going to be straight with you: I'm accustomed to treating people based on how they act, not how they look. And, honestly, you might look more like your brother than ever- _really now_, it's creeping me out, stop that- but your brother acts like a grumpy sixty-five-year-old man half of the time and goddamn Genghis Khan the rest. You, however, are still acting like the same over-excitable thirteen-year-old boy, just with a wider vocabulary, better delivery and a really fucking irritating '_nobody understands me' _teenager complex."

"I was fourteen," he interrupted petulantly.

"You're _still_ fourteen, regardless of how old you are," she scolded. "If you weren't, I don't know, maybe you would have given some thought to how incredibly fucked up it is to proposition your brother's ex-_whateve_r, especially when he's the only one in goddamn world who's consistent in his obligation to care about you."

Mokuba sounded like he was sulking. "He doesn't deserve you," he said fiercely.

Kaiba winced at his conviction.

Jennifer's voice had filled with ferociously cynical humour.

"And how exactly did you come to that conclusion?_ Really,_ Mokuba. Really_. _I'm_ fascinated._ Please, _enrapture_ me with your brilliant logic."

He could hear Mokuba shifting restless.

"He didn't even go after you. My brother-"

The last residue of the stifling heat that had washed over him chilled sharply away at the sheer coldness of her tone.

"_Your brother_," she interrupted crisply, "did the most intelligent thing he could have possibly done. I _have _an unbelievable amount of respect for his patience with you. Unfortunately, I do _not_ possess his very commendable patience." Her short, harsh laugh was as cold as her voice. "And, if I'm right in assuming he was anywhere near as naturally impulsive as you at eighteen, then I'm frankly awestruck by his restraint. _Of which_ you should probably take note and imitate," she said, clicking the last word off of her teeth with a sort of contemptuous bony finality.

His brother wasn't the only one who was speechless.

Even if he had felt the compulsion to interrupt, he wasn't sure if he would be able to.

Mokuba started to say something incoherent, but she cut him off.

"Get out. Come back when you're ready to talk to me like the adult you're presuming to be- or at least be an entertaining idiot."

Kaiba recognized his cue. Mokuba was hesitating, and that only gave him a small window of time to get out of the room, close the door, and get out of sight.

He wasn't accustomed to subterfuge. He was accustomed to planning, to waiting, and to striking, but all of those were readily apparent to those observant enough to see them. He slipped out easily enough, closed the door easily enough, but found himself lost as to where to go. His design team was working so resolutely that he was sure that they wouldn't pose any threat to his sudden need for secrecy, but he couldn't fathom ducking under a table or something equally as trite.

The door opened in a sharp, hasty movement.

Mokuba let it swing shut naturally behind him with an obtrusive bang.

He skulked out of the room without even looking up.

Kaiba just stood where he was, slightly dumbfounded.

_'I suppose there's something to be said for only seeing what you're looking for.'_

_(No Evidence Available)_

She was still grumpy.

Mokuba's nonsensical insistence on confessing his presumption to love her- _'__**why**__, for the love of God, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, bar none'_- and subsequent childish refusal to accept her refusal gracefully was making her somewhat peevish.

Even Jii's cheerful grandfatherly manner and delight in her work hadn't helped. She was afraid that she'd been too curt with him when he'd questioned her mood, and feeling guilty had only made it worse.

She was wandering the halls under the pretence of acquainting herself more fully with the building- _'Ha FUCKING ha'_- but she couldn't escape it.

It was on every floor: in every hall, elevator, stairwell and room. The basement labs, where she worked, weren't as bad.

But the top floor _stank_ of him.

"_You."_

She jumped, startled out of her brooding by the second-last person in the world she wanted to see.

Seto Kaiba was looking down at her from the doorway to his office with an expression of speculative interest. "Come here," he commanded imperiously.

Hearing those words come from his mouth hit her with a horrible surge of paranoid suspicion.

"Why?" she asked carefully, keeping herself turned only halfway towards him on the bizarre chance that she felt the need to bolt. She knew that she probably couldn't outrun him, but preparing helped delude the frantic subconscious bee of paranoia slamming blindly around inside her skull with the promise of an _out_.

Strangely enough, that was one thing she'd never managed to get behind the door. She'd never realized that it had possessed such a potent hold over her before then.

Kaiba rolled his eyes. "Just come here. I have to speak with you."

The paranoid bee started stinging her brain, wailing _'he knows, he knows, HE KNOWS, HE KNOWS'_ which she neither understood nor particularly welcomed.

_'Shut the fuck up, I have to be normal,'_ she told her subconscious acidly, and shoved it off to flail alone in a corner of the dark room.

She wanted to tell him that she hated his office. She didn't, partially because he started speaking before she could decide if it was worth it.

"I have a proposal for you," he said.

"_No,_" she responded, automatically loud and offensive. _'I have had enough of stupid proposals today.'_

He looked strangely amused. "Unfortunately, it's not actually voluntary," he clarified.

She glowered at him, her bad mood worsening. _'How did I know that that was coming?'_ Her subconscious started to pound frantically at the window again. The red evening light made him very little more than a tall, menacing black silhouette against a backdrop of the city. She had to squint behind her glasses to see his face.

The Kaiba silhouette extended a long hand to the side, gesturing for her to sit in front of his desk.

She fidgeted unwillingly. He laughed.

"Don't worry. It's strictly business."

For some reason, that only made her more anxious. She didn't like to be reminded that she'd intentionally cornered herself into a position where she was at his disposal.

She tried to sit but couldn't. Her skin was crawling. She shuffled surreptitiously back to her position by the door.

"What do you want?" she demanded, fully aware that she was being rude.

The Kaiba silhouette chuckled again and gestured for her to close the door. She did so with incredible reluctance.

"Calm down," he ordered firmly. "I'm not going to do anything to you." He slipped his hands in his pockets, as if the act of putting them out of sight would help. She hated that it did. "Genjikou Industrial, Kaiba Corporation's primary contractor, is celebrating the completion of the _Yggdrasill _hub in Hong Kong- the first location in China," he explained. "As C.E.O., I am expected to attend. You're coming with me."

The paranoia bee was dead and drying into a husk on the carpet of the dark room, almost as if to tell her _'I told __**you**__ so.'_

She thought she was speechless until she realized that she was already protesting. "_What?_ No! I'm not going with you! Why would I? Why do I have to be there? I have nothing to do with this! This is a terrible idea!"

She expected him to laugh at her, but, disturbingly, he maintained his serious aspect of purpose. "You have everything to do with this. While not yet _legally_, you are, in reality and in the eye of the consumer, responsible for the most interactive aspect of the newest- and therefore most interesting to the public- expansion of the _Yggdrasill_ world series." He paused, visibly gauging her reaction. "Countless people may wax poetic on the detail of the architecture and landscapes," he said drily, "but, just like in everything else, they all come for the monsters."

She had the strange feeling that he wasn't just referring to the game with that.

"Anyway," he continued, "the celebration that Genjikou Industrial is hosting is still, in essence, a largely public event, and attendance numbers are crucial. Because the majority of China is still shuttered from the popular media of other countries, the initial impact is the most important; the release is guaranteed to go over well, regardless, but the presence of someone directly responsible for the designs of the most immediately memorable parts of the virtual world will attract the attention of the artistic community, which, unlike China's literary, musical and film communities, still goes largely uncensored, making it the most widely accessible demographic to appeal to."

She gaped.

All she could think of to say was, "You wouldn't have brought Toshio."

"I hate Nakamura," he responded, as if that explained everything neatly; which, in a way, she supposed it did.

"Why can't you bring Jii or any of the others? They're 'responsible', too," she bargained, still frantic.

The increasingly good-humoured Kaiba silhouette shook its black cut-out head. "They have outside obligations."

"How do you know that I don't have outside obligations?" she demanded.

He chortled.

"Which is it: that you need to request permission from your employer or that you need to inform your husband?" he drawled.

It stung deep inside her, somewhere around where she assumed her tender wifely heart was supposed to be. She scowled at him belligerently. "You are so very fucking funny, Kaiba. I don't know how I ever possibly managed to forget that."

Something occurred to her.

"And what the hell did you mean, 'while not yet legally responsible'?" she asked him suspiciously.

He smiled in a way that she really did not enjoy. "As of yet, you're working without a contract, which is a hazardous situation for both employer and employee."

Her tentative sanity threw up its hands in defeat.

The paranoia bee was getting rot stains all over the carpet.

She clutched her increasingly light-feeling skull. _"Mephistopheleeees," _she wailed. _"I don't want no four and twenty yeeeears…"_

This time, he did laugh, but not in the horrible demonic way she'd anticipated.

She heard the secretary stop typing on the other side of the wall, obviously startled.

"At this point, you're down to twenty," he said drily.

The last exoskeletal vestiges of the paranoid bee in her head told her to bolt like a madwoman at the first chance that she got.

She pried her hands from her head desperately. "Well, uh, when is it?"

He shuffled though papers for a moment before appearing to take her question seriously. "Hm? Oh. Tomorrow."

She continued her defeated wailing.

_"I hate you so muuuuch..."_

He still didn't look particularly perturbed.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	8. Chapter 8

_**Note:**__ EEEEEEEEIGHT._

_Now the boring part is over!_

_EEEEEEEEIGHT. _

_Edit: Holy shit. Um. This chapter is 7000 words. Holy crap. Teach me how to stop. _

_**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto**__, feel free. I write because I feel compelled to write, but I posted it on the internet because I want to make a few other people happy in the process. Paint murals of it on the walls of your room, if you want to. Go ahead- if it'll make you happy at least a few minutes of a few days, then my work is complete._

_**WandererRaen**__- tsk tsk! You should realize that to be accepted into a group work environment in a major company, they couldn't be socially maladjusted super-nerds; that would cause too much bullshit for a smooth working process. Basement WoW nerds and genuine talented and dedicated nerds-fo'-life-and-work are very, very different._

_**Kheradihr**__, you… changed your username and horribly confused me at first. But friends are always a plus in my book. Bring them in a kinky sense...? Erm. I hope you like this 2x average length super-chapter._

_ALRIGHT, LET'S DO THIS._

_I spent my time writing this chapter running around intermittently muttering 'SO INTENSE, HOLY SHIT, SO INTENSE.'_

_Post-Posting Edit: Seriously, I'm baffled at how this chapter got so fucking long. This story is now almost as long as **White Alice** in just a little more than half the chapters. WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE. _

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Eight_

Apparently Jennifer Nakamura, previously Nauswell, responded to riding airplanes in a singularly decisive manner.

With extreme motion sickness and profuse vomiting.

She'd hit the bathroom the instant the pilot had announced that they could remove their seatbelts, and his first response had been to ascertain if there was anything he could do to assist her.

She'd responded by lobbing a roll of airplane toilet paper at him.

Had it simply been an ordinary roll of toilet paper, this would not have concerned him, but the general weight and consistency of a roll of airplane toilet paper was equal to that of large phonebook- except without the related aerodynamic deficiencies of a large phonebook.

Consequently, he'd retreated to his seat.

The stewardesses, or air hostesses, a legion of blue-skirt-suited ladies on airplanes who were nonetheless capable regardless of gender, whatever the correct term for them had recently become, had spent the last two and a half hours getting steadily bolder in their approaches. He was growing tired of assuring a variety of women that he did not, in fact, want to look at their selection of in-flight refreshments. A pair of them was freshly perched up in the narrow hall behind the cockpit, chattering quickly to one another, occasionally peeking out at him and then retreating with a fresh burst of quiet giggling.

He leaned back in his chair, trying his hardest not to groan. _'Two more hours of this.'_

He hadn't anticipated spending a four and a half hour flight with his companion huddled retching over a blue-watered airplane toilet. The worst part of all of it was that he vaguely remembered her muttering something about the smell of airplane toilets the last time he'd been forced to hold her hair back, and was subsequently haunted by the completely unreasonable but irrepressible feeling that he _should have known_.

Strictly speaking, a lot of things that she did and said that were incomprehensible at the time seemed to later evoke that sensation in him.

One of the airplane women was approaching shyly. She was an attractive, petite thing in her mid-twenties, shiny black hair twisted up in a tasteful chignon, skin the pearlescent soft cream that only came with immaculate care and excellent makeup.

She bent down slightly to speak to him, tucking a non-existent stray hair behind her ear and swallowing almost imperceptibly with nervousness. Her dark eyes flicked to his face and away.

Suddenly, she shrieked.

He could easily understand why.

Jennifer Nakamura looked like something that had crawled out from inside the airplane toilet, not out from over it. She already had blue-black circles under her eyes, and her skin had gone a sickly shade of candlewax yellow. Her colourless hair was smoothed back on her skull with sweat and cold water, short pieces escaping in escaped-asylum-inmate half-whorls. The force of her digestive expulsion had made her eyes bloodshot, and she was breathing narrow, rattling breaths through a mouth left ajar by sheer lack of the will-power and energy required to close it.

He wasn't surprised to find that the blue-skirt-suited airplane woman had bolted while his head had been turned, but he did find it rather unprofessional.

Jennifer sank down beside him with a long, miserable moan. He eyed her warily.

"Are you completely finished?" he asked carefully, assuring himself that she wasn't carrying anything potentially hazardous.

Her voice sounded like she was practicing for an audition in a monster movie. "There is nothing inside of_ meeee_," she groaned.

He frowned. "Would you like some water?"

She rolled her face towards him, staring at him with alarmingly wide, bloodshot eyes. "Nothing. I have _no organs_. There is nothing _inside.._."

He frowned again, this time at her melodrama. "Why did I bring you with me?" he asked her rhetorically. She answered anyway, rolling her head back and forth against the airplane headrest with a consistent _thump-thump-thump_.

"I've been asking myself that for _yeeeears_."

He couldn't stop himself from laughing at that.

"We're only halfway there," he pointed out. She moaned and continued to roll her head back and forth in her rhythm of misery. It was getting progressively more irritating, and watching her do it was giving him a sympathetic headache. He reached over to stop her.

Her skin felt like somewhat had lit a match underneath it.

_"Damn it,"_ he said, rolling her face towards him. Because of the poor lighting on the airplane and the dark circles that she already possessed, he'd failed to notice the feverish blossoming of scarlet high on her cheeks. "You need to see a doctor."

Jennifer shoved at him with surprising strength and vehemence. "I'm fine," she muttered, curling her legs up to her chest and looking over them at him balefully. "This always happens."

He raised an eyebrow inquisitively.

"I didn't suggest it because you'd just say no anyway, but the original reason I started taking sleeping pills was for short airplane flights. And then jet lag. We moved a lot."

"You did mention that," he commented, a little bit nettled at her portraying him as an unreasonable tyrant. "Would it help if you took them now?"

She laughed harshly and then hiccupped, and for a horrible moment, he thought that she was about to start again. The hiccup passed without incident. "Even if I had them, they'd just come right back up. I have to take them an hour or so before; half an hour at least." Her pathetic, dishevelled look was somewhat accusing.

He ignored it prudently. "What about the insomnia?"

She looked confused for a second before her face smoothed out into an expression of miserable indifference. "Eh? Oh, I just dealt with it like everybody else. You know, warm bananas and milk before bed, white noise, soothing music, waves-crashing-on-the-beach bullshit. Never really worked, but it made me feel better to try." She paused speculatively. "I really only started taking them consistently after I got back from my first trip." She lapsed into brooding, feverish silence.

The first-class section was dead silent except for the hiss of the air conditioning, the low chatter of the airplane women, and the occasional soft shuffle of papers. He didn't like it, but he was used to it; midnight or early morning flights were always quiet. The people who booked red-eye flights were the people who wanted badly not to have to be conscious for their flight.

_'Like Jennifer.'_

It was just ironic enough to stop being funny.

When he finally turned to say something to her, he witnessed something astonishing.

Contrary to her own pessimistic insistence, she was sleeping.

_'Comatose is more likely,'_ he thought immediately, and then frowned at his own unkindness.

Seeing her asleep was strangely fascinating. The only times he'd ever seen her sleeping were the morning after the first night of the assignment and the time she'd passed out on her living room floor after babbling something about the fairy-tale _Rumpelstiltskin_, and he considered those more induced comas than anything else. After that, she either didn't sleep, or had passed out after him- and she'd always been up before him, either completely dressed or steadfastly resisting the prospect of clothes.

His mind was going somewhere dangerous without him, and he pulled it back sharply, focusing on just observing her.

It occurred to him that she'd probably complain endlessly if she caught him doing it, but it also occurred to him that she would just do that anyway about something else, so he didn't bother to stop.

Jennifer was twitching.

She was furrowing her eyebrows together. Her lips were moving almost imperceptibly. He leaned closer, trying to listen, but whatever she thought was saying, it was only coming out as a vague, inconsistent hum. She suddenly sucked in a short breath, and her hands twitched rapidly in a series of spastic movements.

He could hear something.

He realized that she was grinding her teeth.

He reached out to shake her and thought better of it. "Wake up," he commanded quietly, just on the off-chance that it would work. "Jennifer. Wake up."

It didn't work. She didn't wake up.

The grinding gradually slowed. She did stop twitching.

When he spoke to her again, her face smoothed out from its distressed expression for only a second before convulsing into a stiff expression that hovered somewhere between worry and pain.

She was muttering again, more agitatedly.

He leaned closer, unsure of what to do.

As a few indistinct vowels filtered through, he realized why she'd sounded so liquid: she wasn't speaking Japanese.

"_Désolé.… Je suis tellement désolé…"_

He jerked away uncomfortably.

"_Sorry… I'm so sorry..."_

_(No Evidence Available)_

When she woke, the airplane was suddenly much darker and smelled less like vomit and chemical toilet cleaner and more like burnt rubber, an abundance of mint-scented air freshener, and fresh ginger.

The ceiling of the airplane had a small two-bulb light under a domed plastic casing, adjacent grey plastic switch in the 'off' position, surrounded by what looked like miles of misplaced grey carpet.

Her armrests were missing.

She was horribly disoriented.

She could hear the rising and falling sounds of a city. Her common sense reluctantly hoisted its eyes open.

'_Where am I?'_

"You're awake?" the probably-not-an-airplane asked her. She jerked in reaction, twisting herself to the side and up so quickly that her head spun.

Kaiba was looking at her with visible amusement. She scowled at him. There was a familiar throbbing soreness balled up below her ribs.

"Good," he said without waiting. "We've just pulled in. Get up."

Her subconscious helpfully filled in the blank letters for her.

The taxi driver was an older, dark-skinned Asiatic man, either mixed-race or Filipino, and judging from his look of irritated disbelief, she wasn't sure if he was just naturally impatient or if Kaiba had taken creative liberties with the word 'just'.

She scrabbled forward with her hands on the seats and her feet on the floor, still both physically and mentally unsettled. She felt Kaiba's hand close securely around her arm as she nearly toppled forward onto the sidewalk. She batted at it to let go despite the fact that she still wasn't rightly sure if she was stable- or awake- enough to walk on her own.

His touch fundamentally alarmed her. It provoked a horrible sense of guilt that started building in the pit of her gut, the pressure eventually high enough to press the air out of her lungs.

She took a deep breath when he let go, and squinted up in the crisp, early September sunlight.

She'd expected no less. She hadn't wanted it, but she'd certainly expected it.

She would have found herself very confused if she'd been wrong.

It was what she liked to call a 'rocketship hotel'.

Not for any particular aesthetic reason, though she'd witnessed those that fit both the name and the appearance, but because the obsessively organized and imposing entrances and exits of the building, neatly staffed with serious looking carbon-copied security guards, made what was left of her childish wonder want desperately to believe that it was all held together with unbreakable satellite glue carefully distilled from limpet spit.

It was the sort of place where all of the patrons were brilliant privacy-obsessed workaholic hermits with paranoia complexes and enough money and public attention to merit them.

It was a very Seto Kaiba place.

She scowled childishly at it, too, as he waved at her loosely to move along inside.

The outside unnerved her, but the inside made her aghast.

'_This is __**too**__ much of a Kaiba place.'_

The slippery black marble floors, the elevators tucked discreetly away in a solid wall of chrome silver, the black-painted hardwood and brushed pewter reception desk-

She was back in Transylvania.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Jennifer was drifting away across the marble.

'_Again.'_

He frowned back at her. She looked nervously over her shoulder to check if he was looking and then froze as if he wouldn't notice that she'd moved. He looked imperiously down his nose at her.

She skulked back to the reception desk reluctantly, shining her glasses on her sweater as though they were her excuse.

He'd given up on asking. With the Hong Kong dinner that night, the reception was swamped with both legitimate complaints and potential scam artists, and his receptionist was checking very carefully to make sure that he was who he claimed to be.

He didn't think it helped particularly that the dishevelled woman lingering suspiciously out of reach, jarringly clad in loose jeans and a sweater, didn't really match public expectations of what would fit into the category 'Seto Kaiba and Companion'.

With the amount that he was having to watch her, it was coming across a little more like 'Seto Kaiba and Recently Adopted Street Child'.

She was drifting again. He scowled. "Please excuse me for a moment," he told the slim receptionist, at the end of his patience.

He grabbed her by the shoulders when she turned to check.

For once, he was glad that her protest came out more like the strangled noise of a cat with a hairball than her usual profane shrieking. He steered her up to the desk forcibly.

"This," he told the receptionist calmly, "Is _Mrs. _Nakamura, Kaiba Corporation's new Director of Visual Image Development and previously outsourced independent modeller."

The receptionist's look was less awe and more _'Oh, I see, a super-nerd.' _She checked her screen again diligently and then nodded firmly. "You're through. Welcome, _Mister_ Seto Kaiba," her eyes flicked from him to the surreptitiously squirming woman under his hands, "and… company. Here are your room keys. The room numbers are engraved into them for easy reference. Please make your way to the fourteenth floor at your leisure."

He took the thin metal and plastic cards from her before Jennifer's hand could dodge out and snatch one, tucking them inside his suit jacket. They still smelled fresh, like wet copper coins and new sneakers.

He pushed her towards the elevators, still holding her by her bony shoulders. As they arrived there, she stilled, suddenly complacent for a moment. He looked down, curious.

She was looking off to the side with a distant expression. "Oh. Are we leaving Transylvania?"

Something about that reference rang distant bells of familiarity.

"Yes," he said, too aware that it was easier not to ask questions when she'd wandered off in an entirely separate, psychological sense.

"Oh," she said pleasantly. He pushed her into an elevator. As the doors slid shut, she started to look troubled again. "Where are we going now?"

His gut told him that she was going to react rashly, and he believed it. "We've just checked into a hotel. We're going to a hotel room," he told her frankly.

He wasn't above admitting that, sometimes, her overwrought and completely irrational responses were quite amusing to him.

Jennifer was jittering her fingers in repetitive spastic motions in front of her. He grabbed her wrists before she could do something stupid and destructive- a feat of immediacy she tended towards that he didn't think had faded with age. Something about the memory of exposed grey strips of drywall where perfectly good hinges had been made him distrust her instinctive reactions.

"_Don't,"_ she snarled, jerking her hands backwards and forwards in a vain attempt to make him release her. _"Don't touch me_. I am not sleeping in a hotel room with _you_. I'll sleep in the hallway if I have to. _Let go!_"

"Be quiet," he reprimanded her calmly, jerking her wrists forward a little more roughly than he'd intended. She'd started using her whole- though still somewhat insignificant- weight to pull at his grip, leaning back on the heels of her feet. "You're acting like a child for nothing. You're absolutely correct. You are not sleeping in a hotel room with me."

Her sudden dumbfounded look was worth the aggravation of her bony wrists working back and forth across his palms. He felt himself frown at the realization that she'd already started to lose the tentative weight she'd gained whilst away. _'With Nakamura.'_ The thought that Nakamura could keep her fed better than he could made him less amused and more irritable.

"I'm not?" she asked, eyebrows pulled together in confusion. She shook her head suddenly. Colour, not feverish, but close, was rising in her cheeks. "Of course I'm not. But… I thought…"

She looked abruptly very embarrassed at her assumption. He quirked an eyebrow at her, somewhat amused.

"This is a business trip, Jennifer."

She pulled the corners of her lips out in a familiar scowl, and then her whole face jumped into bright alertness. "When did you start doing that?"

She sounded confused and suspicious again. He raised his eyebrow further, questioning.

She'd started to shift uncomfortably. The shiny chromed interior of the elevator was making her haphazardly dried hair pick up shimmers of silver. The tinny _ting_ of the elevator and the soft blue digital lettering above the door said that they'd reached their floor.

"When did you start calling me by my first name? You always used to call me _Nauswell._"

The wry smile worked its way across his face infectiously. He didn't try to stop it. "You're not a Nauswell anymore. I refuse to call you _Nakamura_, or any variant thereof." He couldn't resist. "Would you prefer to be called Jen?"

He had to turn to stop the door from closing, and took the opportunity of stepping out into the corridor of the fourteenth floor to hide his irrepressible knowing smirk. The muddled frantic pitch of her voice was making it difficult to hide.

"_No_." Her sneakers were pattering loudly on the richly patterned carpet behind him as she struggled to keep up with his long stride. She sounded a little bit petulant, and a lot suspicious. "You really don't make a good case for not being at least some kind of demon, you know."

The doors were sprawled widely- a good indicator of size, but he had been hoping for something closer to an elevator or stairwell. The room keys were unhelpful except in telling him that he was steadily getting closer to his destination.

The low-set and frosted wall sconces made the dark slate colour of the walls look almost black between where the circles of light hit.

"You don't make a good case for being a quiet, average and indifferent human being, let alone a prototypical housewife," he told her drily, turning his head slightly to look back at her.

She looked a little puzzled.

"But I'm _not_ a prototypical housewife," she retorted lamely, and then paused.

The doors were fast approaching. He noted with satisfaction that theirs were set across the hall from each other, rather than side-by-side. It felt both more familiar and more appropriate.

She had resumed talking. The paranoid, feverish pitch in her voice had heightened.

"I'm _not_ normal. You know that. What are you implying?" She paused. "By your logic, you're implying that you're not _not_ some kind of demon. That's a double negative. So what are you implying?"

He handed her the room card without answering, and retreated into his room.

He closed the door on her wide-eyed expression of alarm.

_(No Evidence Available)_

The hotel room was nice. Clean. Spacious.

Artistically half-empty.

Unfamiliar.

She didn't like it.

The hall the celebration was being held in was the same, decorated in high-contrast matte black and eggshell cream, dark green and gold accent pieces dotting the tables.

She'd never had to think too much about what to wear. She spent the larger part of her time troubling over what her body was doing without her permission, and less about how it looked.

Jennifer only owned two dresses. She'd only brought one with her.

She didn't like the narrow, unsatisfied way that _he_ looked at her when she wore her white dress.

It was starting to dawn on her that despite that subtle discomfort, it may have been the better choice.

Everyone else was dressed according to the theme; men in their heavy black suits and forest green ties or dark velvet smoking jackets, gold cufflinks catching the buttercream lighting, women in their jade floor-length gowns, sunshine yellow cocktail dresses, slinky black numbers in satin or silk, touting gold pumps, gold boleros, gold clutches and earrings and necklaces and more.

Violet.

She was in the middle of a plethora of mostly dark-haired, dark-eyed people carefully imitating all of the summer colours and textures of a fantastical forest clearing, and she was wearing violet lace.

Violet: The colour lurking at the end of human perception, the shortest visible wavelength, scientifically, the least visible colour.

She didn't feel invisible.

Between her hair and her dress, she felt remarkably like a lost cockatiel that had accidentally fluttered into the peacock exhibit of a local zoo.

Jennifer was once again reminded of how strongly she disliked having an audience with more interest in observing and less in interacting.

Kaiba was talking seriously with a group of equally stern-looking businessmen. She had very little desire to join them and succumb to their curious stares.

She took solace in the one thing that she could find that was close to her own colouration:

The wine.

The other partygoers seemed to know who she was instinctively, or perhaps had been previously informed, but shied away quickly at her white-knuckled clutching of her wineglass and forced half-grimacing smiles. She felt sorry for them on a low, essential level, but the seemingly endless pranced circles and strategic looping movements of both the guests and the staff made her feel as though she was participating in a dance that she didn't know the steps to. She didn't know what to say. She didn't know who to talk to, in the first place, even if she had.

She followed her own looping pattern across the room, avoiding her sometime acquaintance and new employer's gaze when it came for her, checking to make sure she was behaving, assessing the damage she could have caused in his inattention.

Jennifer found herself back by the bar, looking for another glass; ironically, more to cope with missing the days when two glasses had her stumbling rather than the earnest desire for a sixth. The wine had dulled the ache in her face from hours of clenching her jaw, which she found nice, but she could see only the beginnings of a blur in her peripheral vision.

The staff at the bar was too busy dashing in and out of sight to notice her, and she was reluctant to attract more attention than she already had. She lingered surreptitiously, spinning the stem of her glass between forefinger and thumb.

A hand settled on her shoulder. She jumped not because she knew it was _him_, but because she knew that it _wasn't_, and that was much stranger.

It was stranger, in that it _was_ a stranger. She eyed him nervously. He laughed pleasantly in response, putting up an empty hand inoffensively and handing her a glass of something darker and redder than she'd been drinking before.

He was younger than most attendees, mid-twenties at the oldest, and, she was fascinated to see, resplendent in a wine red velvet jacket of his own, almost ostentatiously feminine in cut. Under his loose bangs, there was something- good makeup or a tattoo- running in a line down from one eye. He smoothed stray pieces of his equally long, feminine hair out of his face in one smooth continuous motion of his free hand.

She found herself laughing unintentionally at his obvious flair, and took the wine from him as a sort of unspoken apology.

_'Oh well,'_ she mused drily, _'Even if he's put anything in it, it's very unlikely it's something I haven't had before- voluntarily, at that.'_

He looked delighted when she brought it to her mouth. "It's so gratifying to me to find another person of confidence and good taste in these droll proceedings," he told her in Japanese, obviously loud enough by nature that his voice carried easily over the hum of chatter. He offered her an open palm.

She stared at it, confused, and raised her own hand instinctively- a Western carryover that she'd never been able to break.

It seemed to have the desired effect. He took her hand and kissed it with a strange sort of flamboyant gallantry. She laughed again, cluing into the fact that whoever this person was, he was so deeply engrossed in his own self-love that her laughing at him would have very little effect on that.

She liked him more for it. Not having to worry about offending him made her more relaxed. Having someone specific to focus on made the murmurs of speculation, circling the room in their own ways, easier to ignore.

Still holding her hand, he bowed and took a glass from an attendant for himself. "The house wine they serve at these things is always horrific." He winked at her, twirling his own glass. "Otogi, but I'm sure that you knew that. Call me Ryuji. And you are…?"

She didn't know that, but was sure she wouldn't be able to convince him. She smiled her own sly smile of the night. "Jennifer."

Otogi-call-me-Ryuji looked entranced. "Just a first name? How teasing of you. Come," he said suddenly, pulling at her hand.

She frowned a little to herself. The wine was good, but her subconscious was ringing up alarm bells about something. _'Does he ever intend to let go of my hand?'_ she thought, and then wondered why it mattered.

There was a small group of leisurely dancing couples by the band, and her black-haired, red-coated companion twirled her flamboyantly into them. She grimaced and swore quietly as a small slicing wave of wine splashed out over her hand. Otogi pulled her closer, chuckling at her bemused expression.

_'Dancing with each partner holding a glass of wine is somewhat awkward,'_ she thought arbitrarily. "I can't dance," she told him instead.

He chuckled, and turned her more slowly. "Born with… _two left feet_, as the Americans put it? You seem different. Are you mixed?"

She ignored his question in favour of humour. "It's a little bit more like I was born without feet," she said drily.

He laughed uproariously at that.

She found it strangely gratifying how self-evident his emotions were.

The room was still settled into the smooth rising, falling and cresting-wave sounds of conversation.

She could feel him staring.

Blurry peripherals or no, from the corner of her eye, Seto Kaiba looked none too pleased.

_'Yes, well, that is what I was worried about,'_ her subconscious told her flatly.

_'Why would you worry?' _she asked it spitefully._ 'Why would it matter to him?'_

When it shrugged and sighed inside its half-lit room, she ignored it and _him _in favour of her more amicable companion.

_(No Evidence Available)_

"You have got to be _fucking kidding me_."

Seto Kaiba was a variety of drunk that she'd been fortunate enough only to encounter only a few times in the not insubstantial entirety of her drinking career.

As he grew more intoxicated, it was his temper and his physical coordination that deteriorated rather than his coherence or inclement wilfulness. He was absolutely convinced that he was sober, and brooked no argument on the subject.

Given her natural propensity to be both wilful and argumentative, they were, of course, arguing.

_"No," _she told him fiercely, yanking yet again at his coat. "You are going to walk this off. It's only three blocks to the hotel, and the rest of the world has enough problems of its own without me exposing it to you like this." It was late enough at night that the streets were, for once, almost deserted. She shoved him forward with both palms flat on his back, trying to get him moving in the right direction. "It's bad enough that _I_ have to deal with you."

She suppressed the guilt that was threatening to rise as she scooted up beside him to guide him by the arm. He didn't seem to appreciate it either.

"As much as I dislike having to subject myself to another taxi," he said acidly, trying to shake her hands off, "The prospect of being robbed a block from my hotel is somewhat less appealing. Let go. Give me my phone."

She stuck out her tongue at him for lack of anything else to do, and consider telling him that she hadn't taken his phone; it was still in his pocket, where he'd left it. "No, no, and _no_. We'll be fine. You'll be fine. You're so full of unreasonable demands _normally _that trying to rob you right now would be like having a head-butting contest with a ram. _Brains on the sidewalk_, at best."

He was starting to meander closer to the curb. She yanked him over again. He jerked his arm out of her fingers and glowered at her.

She glanced back. They'd made it less than a block.

"At this rate, it's going to be tomorrow before we get back," she groaned, and tried to urge him to walk faster. His cold look told her that she should have reconsidered her decision, then, but he'd clammed up and was uncommunicative, no matter her provocation.

He was also getting steadily more uncooperative. She hissed her frustration through her teeth, shoving at his back with a hand again. "Oh, for _Christ's sake_." There was a still brightly lit and flashing sign for some kind of late night eatery across the street, and it hurt her eyes. "I can't believe you. You're impossible. I don't understandhow you exist most of the time," she snarled, rubbing at her eyes. Her contacts were starting to itch.

He stopped dead and gave her a malevolent look, arms crossed. She threw her hands up in defeat. "Do you want to stand in the middle of a Chinese sidewalk all night? Okay. I'm going back to the hotel. Goodbye."

He grabbed her when she tried to turn away. She looked down at his long, pale fingers and then up at his face in steadily mounting annoyance. "Are you even capable of making up your mind?" she demanded. Her head was starting to pound. The tube lighting across the street was jarring the edge of her vision.

"What are you referring to?"

So low, so reticent that she could barely hear him. She snarled at him again, tapping her heel impatiently. Her feet were aching badly, beyond the meagre blanket of comfort wine could provide.

She could feel her subconscious reaching up prophetically to cover its ears, wincing.

"You," she said, letting out her own acid, "are unfathomable. Nothing you do _ever_ makes any sense to me." She raised a stiff hand to her face in frustrated bewilderment. "I mean: I appear, albeit unintentionally, back into your life with a husband that you _hate_, and admit, openly, that you hate, and you spend a grand total of_ maybe _twenty minutes in a state of visible murderous loathing," she dropped her hand emphatically, "and then are promptly over it, like it never happened, and never mention it again. _Now_ you take me to public… _party_, or something, that I know no one at, abandon me, and the instant that I start talking to someone genuinely interesting of the opposite sex, you begin this bizarre process and get progressively grumpier and more _shitwrecked_ but will neither admit nor discuss it. And you know that I am not stupid enough to assume that_ this,_" she said, gesturing broadly to his inebriated state, "is a regular occurrence_._"

He'd let go and crossed his arms again. His eyes were narrowed, but still glinted that overbright frosty grey-blue in the low light of street lamps and overnight shop lights. His mouth was set in a no-communication line.

She dropped both of her hands to her sides. "I don't understand you. I really don't. I never have completely, and I really, _really_ don't right now. This… is a totally illogical reaction. I don't understand."

He was watching her speak, his cold eyes moving sharply from her mouth to her restlessly fidgeting fingers and back to her drawn-in and working eyebrows. He'd started working the fingers of one hand in an impatient drumbeat on one arm. She scuffed the ground anxiously with her shoe. It was harder not to be affected by his piercing glower when she had something to feel guilty about.

Abruptly, he started walking again- in the right direction, which she was thankful for- but so quickly and harshly that she was having to keep up an awkward half-run in her heels to keep pace with him, carefully shoving him away from the sidewalks when his brisk trot started to wander.

She was gasping for air by the time they'd made it back to the hotel, and when he made a beeline for the stairs, she moaned. "Why? For fuck's sakes, _why?_" She grabbed him again, this time around the waist, and turned him towards the elevators with all of her strength. As he stopped, looking down under his arm at her, evidently fairly startled, she mashed the small black 'call elevator' button with her finger.

He was just looking at her again, but this time with less malevolence and more interest. She grimaced back up at him. "Just… stop for a second, please."

It took all of her willpower not to slide down against the wall and peel her shoes off. It was an act of vulnerability that she didn't feel like performing under his intense scrutiny.

The doors slid open almost silently. Equally breathless, she held out an arm of invitation. He almost looked amused when he stepped inside.

She liked watching the floors zoom by. She'd been too preoccupied the first time to notice, but the blue numbers morphed fluidly rather than just clicked away, and it was mesmerizing enough to get her mind off of her aching feet, her aching jaw, and the fact that he was still watching her intently.

Her subconscious had taken its hands from its eyes and was staring down the door in her mind. She frowned inwardly at it. It just laughed at her and asked her what the fuck she thought she'd gotten herself into.

Fourteen morphed into sight and the doors slid out of it. Kaiba imitated her arm of invitation mockingly.

Tired as she was, the hallway gave her the same impression of fluidity. Unfortunately, it also seemed to go on forever. She reached her door with a strange feeling of relieved triumph, and let herself in without even glancing back.

When she let it go, the door hit something mid-swing.

He was leaning against her doorframe, still looking at her accusingly. She sighed, exasperated. "Go to bed. _Your_ bed."

He actually laughed at that, huffing amusedly through his nose. She crossed her arms for a second and then groaned in defeat. "_Fuck_ it," she muttered, peeling off her heels. "I don't care anymore."

"Don't you?"

She looked up and frowned. He wasn't in the doorway.

She had to resist a squawk when his hand settled on her waist.

The wall was cold. His skin was unbelievably warm- the kind of sudden heat that made her shiver not from reaction, but from surprise. She could feel a heartbeat in the palm on her wrist, a slow sensation of pressure from his thumb sliding down the front of her dress.

His face was too close. He smelled like good wine and expensive cologne, but she was instinctively smelling fresh coffee anyway.

Her subconscious told her to duck out, get gone, sleep in his room if she had to, though she knew that it could wreck her tentative sanity.

The _want_, on the other hand, had finally slunk out from the shadows, stepping carefully across that line of light from his doorway, smiling its crooked little knowing smile. It threw the first punch.

Her brain was fighting itself, clawing and scratching for dominance; a sometimes indomitable sexual instinct battling a desperate absolute knowledge that this was_ so, __**so**__ wrong_.

The tip of his nose brushed hers. He was watching her mouth.

He looked as though he was considering his next move very carefully.

She realized that she was chewing her lip when a harsh sting of pain lanced through her mouth.

She didn't know what to do.

She didn't know what she _could_ do.

His hand had migrated down her arm, across her shoulder, to the back of her neck. She shivered again as his fingers pushed up through her hair. His nose brushed hers again.

She recognized it, and panicked.

He was considering _pushing_, and she'd never been able to handle that.

The _want_ was pulling suggestively at the collar of her struggling subconscious' shirt, and even it was getting flustered, confusing what was a good idea with what just felt good. Too preoccupied with each other to notice, out from the corner minced an unexpected hero.

His lips barely brushed hers.

She _blurted_ automatically.

"You should_ hate me._"

She wasn't exactly sure where it had bubbled forth from, but she was both deeply grateful for and incredibly frustrated by the result. He jerked back, obviously startled, and just looked at her.

"I should," he confirmed. His fingers resumed working their way through the short hairs on the back of her neck. It was very distracting.

"You should," she repeated frantically. She felt the warm gust of his laughter on her face and realized that he was recovering his lost composure. "I was gone for four years," she insisted, rambling for the sake of keeping him just far enough away for her to think. "It doesn't make any_ sense._"

A private little smirk. He was watching her mouth again. "What doesn't make sense?"

"This. _You_, but I've said that enough tonight. The way you react to things. You being jealous over things. You being jealous over _me_," she ranted incredulously. It felt good to rant. It pulled her attention towards her mouth and away from his exploratory hand or the confused pause in the fistfight in her brain.

Another chuckle. His hand was working its sinuous way up her ribs.

"Why doesn't that make sense?"

Another little shiver. "Because you should hate me. It's only reasonable. I ran off, caused a lot of bullshit thereby, up to and including making your brother the second stupidest person in existence, got married to the stupidest person in existence for exactly that reason, and sauntered back in reluctantly with no apology or explanation. It's been _four years. _I've gone white and I look even less like I sleep than ever. At the very least, you shouldn't be attracted to me. But you really should hate me."

His hand had smoothed down into the small of her back, and he was pulling her away from the wall. She could feel the heat of his palm through the lace. "I really should."

She turned her face away from his probing gaze. "Don't be so unreasonable," she muttered.

She could feel the rumble of his laugh in his chest.

His cheek brushed her ear in a way that was much, much too nostalgic. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to shove it back.

"I'm not unreasonable," he told her quietly.

Whether or not his mind was, his body was unreasonably warm through his clothes. The parts of her shoulders and arms still pressed against the wall felt like they were freezing in comparison. "Then what's your _brilliant_ explanation?" she asked, still desperately clinging to the hope that she could distract him.

"I'm not unreasonable," he insisted. The softness of his lips ghosted against her ear.

She felt her breathing narrow with what could have been heavy guilt or something else entirely.

"No?" She tried to giggle, but it came out too breathy and short.

"No."

His arm tightened around her waist. The hand on the back of her neck had sent a thumb trailing down the edge of her jaw.

"I'm not unreasonable. My loyalty is absolute. There is nothing unreasonable about that."

The entirety of her brain paused, holding its breath in shock.

Her subconscious had sat back on its hands, for once utterly speechless.

Even the _want_ had reverted back from imitating him, and was sitting on the carpet with its legs sprawled out and chewing its fingers in girlish piqued shyness.

'_Even I,'_ it said, dumbfounded, _'don't have the capacity to cause a reaction like that.'_

She was floundering in a sudden void of guidance. Her mind started to register snatches of something almost like radio static.

"You're drunk," she told him. It was the first safe thing that had come to mind.

"I am not drunk," he snapped, sharply but quietly. Judging by the sudden convulsion of his fingers and the tightness of his arm around her, she had finally managed to offend him.

His face swung out from beside hers into view. He was watching her with a deeply unimpressed expression of determination. His fingers twisted into the back of her hair in a way that she knew.

In knowing what was coming, she panicked.

In panicking, she remembered what she had a tendency to forget around him: That she had free, completely functioning hands.

She shoved him back, both palms flat against his chest, with enough force to send him reeling into the opposite wall. "Get out of here," she whispered desperately.

His hair was starting to fall into his face, but he didn't seem to have noticed. He was watching her with a look of total incomprehension.

She screamed with what little air she had left in her lungs.

"_Get out!_"

She had to shove him back again, out of the door, almost knocking him over in the hallway when she slammed the door behind him. The locks were too difficult to manipulate, slippery and smooth under her fumbling fingers.

There was a deep, mounting pain building inside her ribcage that had nothing to do with either guilt or sex. She slid down, leaning her forehead heavily against the door with a painful moan.

The heard the door across the hall open and close with the same sort of quiet patience.

Somehow, that only made it worse. She bit back a scream of frustration and just hissed through clenched teeth.

"_Ffffuck…"_

_(No Evidence Available)_


	9. Chapter 9

_**Note:**__ Holy fuck, chapter nine. B-b-batter up!_

'_Pure distilled Seto Kaiba, 100 Proof', eh, __**Kheradihr**__? Now __**that**__ is something I wouldn't mind getting drunk off of! Unfortunately, considering that it's Kaiba, it'd be one of those super-duper expensive palm-sized bottles they keep locked in a secure glass and steel cabinet for only the most distinguishin' customahs, dahling. So you and I? I guess we'll just have to keep getting our kicks here, then. (Though seriously, that sounds both delicious AND sexy. And, of course, intoxicating in a number of ways.)_

_Wat wat? __**Gernzy**__, I didna' mean to devastate you when __**YSS!**__ ended. D: Initially, the ending I had planned for it was the same as the one I have planned for this… which I shall not post further comment on. (Moo ha ha ha ha.)_

_**WandererRaen**__, to me, drunk Kaiba can only mean one thing. Sexually liberated? Naw. Emotionally sensitive? Naw, naw. _

_Old man crabbiness and absolute refusal to admit that he's drunk? __**Oh fuck, absolutely**__. That sort of weird impossible stubbornness is something I just find so quintessentially Kaiba. "Magic? Right in front of my eyes? Used on my brother in a very obvious fashion?"_

_**Seto Kaiba says:**__ "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU. GODDAMN NERDS." And promptly whips out his own cards like he's not one too. _

'_Creature from the Depth of the In-Flight Restroom' seems like it should be the title of this story, for the sake of posterity._

_Edit: Jennifer Nakamura, lady mistress of unintentional innuendo and rampant denial!_

_Double-Edit: I FEEL SO LOOOOVED. _

_Triple-Edit: DON'T KILL ME. _

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out who did. (Spoiler: Kazuki Takahashi may own Yu-Gi-Oh, but it wasn't him.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Nine_

She hadn't slept.

She never slept.

Strangely, she'd always wanted to see space.

Jennifer was of the opinion that there was no better place for that than in her foe's illustrious rocketship hotel.

_"Klaatu… Barada… Nikto,"_ she told the extraterrestrial hovering in her doorway. It hesitated, nervously half-baring its teeth in what she supposed to be a pathetic imitation of human expression, and then slipped out of sight. The bridge was clear of invaders. For now.

'_The first victory is mine against my Martian foe. Not gonna take 'way mah white picket fence, nuh-uh, dem critters dunno nothing with them mindreadin's 'cause I'm all tinfoil all the way down.'_

Alas, it was a menial servant. It returned with its leader and then dashed away again, perhaps supposing that that was what she sought.

It was not what she sought. This formidable reinforcement was the last thing she sought. She sunk lower into her open suitcase, her impenetrable base of operations, drawing the bedsheets of her spacesuit up around her face.

The alien leader threw up its terrifyingly long and gangly hands.

"Oh, goddamn it,_ Nauswe_- Jennifer, we're going to miss the flight."

It crossed the room in a few leggy strides, its black and white shipsuit and bizarre alien musculature wholly unfamiliar to her. Those slim white alien talons came swooping down from above, and she attempted to slap at them with her own hands wrapped carefully in bedsheet spacesuit gloves, concerned by the possibility of virulent alien infection. She seemed to recall that the touch of those alien feelers caused a sensation of intense burning on contact, and was determined to react accordingly.

"Jennifer, get up," it said roughly, parroting her human language in what she could only assume was an attempt to disarm her.

She hunkered down further inside her navigation console.

It growled. She supposed it had revealed its true language.

The alien leader began to pull and tear at her spacesuit. She set up a wailing red alert. _"Noooo, nooo, don't expose me to your alien air…"_ she implored desperately. It retreated for a moment, seeming to comprehend, and watched her with bright and speculative birdlike eyes before retreating again to the door.

"Can you gather everything together and have it brought downstairs?" it asked something just outside of the bridge.

Its strange words provoked a deep, forbidding sense of unease.

Those birdlike eyes flicked back inside at her. She gripped the edge of her seat of operations in preparation.

It was to no avail.

The alien lord's strength was too mighty for her flimsy human body. She found herself flying upwards, flung away from her base by some indomitable alien force. She flopped over the wide and bony protrusion that her species would inevitably refer to as a shoulder in their future incomprehension; she would tolerate it when she escaped, thankful that the rest of her species was not subjected to the ministrations of probing alien fingers.

For she knew better.

It was something _far more sinister_.

The ground travelled below her eyes in rich whorls and shimmers meant only to deceive the human eye. She wriggled like a fish, attempting to free herself through the involuntary expulsion of viscous slime she supposed was naturally produced by these strange creatures, but it adjusted her cleverly, talons hooked into her spacesuit- a deadly proposition if it should burst, exposing her to the alien pathogen.

It paused, examining an unfathomable sheet of glistening silver before expelling an audibly impatient breath. The journey down the adjoining passage was one obviously meant for pure torment, as the descent jostled her on every movement, slamming her delicate human ribs and stomach against the sinister protuberance they rested on. She made a small, involuntary whining sound of discomfort and bit it back quickly. _'I must not show fear.'_

The alien leader had noticed. Its birdlike eyes were cast backwards at her above a flat and inexpressive alien mouth.

"Jennifer, you risk seriously offending me if you intend to continue reacting to my advances by slipping into some sort of bizarre delusional fantasy world," it told her seriously.

"Advances?" She scoffed. This alien monstrosity was obviously attempting to unsettle her perceptions of reality through its mind-altering abilities. She knew better. "That's impossible," she told it primly, envisioning her triumphant return to Earth.

"Oh?"

She squirmed nervously as it adjusted her spacesuit. They left the descent into a wide room with endless and familiar dark floors.

"Of course it's impossible," she repeated, undeniably nervous but firm in her correct human conviction. "We're not the same species. This isn't a science-fiction romance, you know."

It rolled too-bright, extraterrestrial eyes.

There was a deceptively feminine alien wearing a delicate alien headset, perched daintily behind a heavy protective alien control center. The leader of the aliens paused in front of it.

"Excuse me; my employee is having a serious bout of temporary insanity. She's not dangerous. Is the taxi here?"

The prim alien paused and looked at her with its own pitiless black eyes. It looked markedly unimpressed, but nodded sharply.

The alien control center faded in the view as the alien leader's long strides carried her further away from her safety net. The menial alien servant from before had appeared by the elevators, holding her_ suit_controlcenter_case_ gingerly aside.

"_Gort_," she said suddenly, "cease this behaviour immediately."

It raised a thin eyebrow at her. "I don't recognize your reference. What happened to Mephistopheles?"

She scowled at her captor. "It is your choice entirely what you respond to, my formidable foe."

It chuckled, and cast back a very good imitation of a sly look. "I may prefer 'Genghis Khan', if anything," it told her drily.

For a very specific reason that she couldn't locate, that horrified her.

Liu Xiao Xi's last memory of Seto Kaiba's dishevelled, bed-sheet-wearing companion would be of her screaming something incoherent in English about tinfoil hats and mind reading.

The rest of the receptionist's day was decidedly more average.

_(No Evidence Available)_

For the sake of everyone's sanity, he'd let her sedate herself for the plane ride back.

It was less than she'd wanted, and she was continually waking up, groggy and dazed, talking to him in brief and sometimes nonsensical snatches before slipping back into sleep, but she wasn't sick. As far as he was concerned, that was all that mattered.

She looked healthier when she slept, too.

The dark circles had noticeably faded under her eyes over the last three hours, looking more like what they were and less like he was in the habit of beating her. Under the influence of sedation, she also twitched less, and more slowly, her expressions shifting leisurely between puzzlement, worry, and the occasional tiny closed-mouth smile.

It was usually then that she woke, looking startled and nervous.

She was awake now, but drifting fast.

Her eyes had closed. The way her dark circles had faded inwards made it look like she had a band of thick black eyelashes resting against her cheeks. He could see, very faintly, a few short, glistening white hairs among them. Her breathing started to slow again.

It hitched mid-breath. Her fingers twitched. Her eyes slid open again. Her head listed sideways away from the seat, as though the movement of opening her eyes had carried through the entirety of head skull.

She raised her hands to her face and scrubbed at it before glowering at him again. "What're_ you_ staring at?" she muttered at him contentiously.

It was somewhat less intimidating, considering her sleepy expression and the fact that the vast majority of her hair was sticking up at the back. He resisted the urge to smirk. "I am not staring at anything. What were you dreaming about?"

She wrinkled her nose at him indifferently. "None of your business."

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "Then we're agreed."

She made a sour expression and imitated him, mouthing his words back to him silently. He suppressed a little smile.

One of the airplane women- they were different ones, but still wearing their token blue skirt-suits- hovered over Jennifer's seat inquisitively. He interrupted her before she could ask if they wanted the lunch menu- the last thing that he wanted was something fresh for his volatile companion to potentially regurgitate.

"We're fine," he told her sharply. She threw him a startled look and backed off, dodging into the middle-class seating section with a disturbed backwards glance.

Jennifer chuckled. Groggy as she was, it came out throaty and raw. "I wish you wouldn't do that."

He frowned at her. "Do what?"

She turned her head towards him, smiling crookedly in a dry, closed-mouth way. "You keep trying to make all of my decisions for me," she told him. "I'm not five. I can answer basic questions without your assistance. I've been doing it for a very long time."

He thought about her decision-making skills. The first thing that popped to mind was Nakamura. He frowned again. "Your preceding examples don't reassure me," he told her flatly.

She laughed, and then was quiet for a long moment.

"I have good reasons for doing the things that do," she said slowly. He arched an eyebrow at her, and she grimaced apologetically. "None of your business."

He snorted heavily through his nose. "I'll continue not being reassured, then." A snide sideways glance was creeping across his face. "And subsequently continue trying to make all of your decisions," he added drily.

She grimaced again. This time, it wasn't even slightly apologetic. "Oh, lovely." A soft snort of her own. "I know that I have no right to ask you to, but I do wish that you'd just trust me." She swallowed covertly, and looked away.

The soft lighting on the plane was competing with above-the-clouds late morning sunlight streaming sidelong into the windows, through the too-thin pull-down shades. Her face was two different colours, caught between the conflicting light sources.

It was too pained to be a sneer, the corner of her mouth pulled to the side with all of the emotive resonance of someone caught on a fishhook. "I know you think that you do, but you really don't want to know."

He crossed his arms across his chest, irritated by her manner. It was a little bit too similar to someone trying to explain death to a small, stubborn child. "As the appointed decision-maker and answerer of questions, I am afraid that I have to dismiss that as an unsound theory."

She had started to fade out again, and was struggling to stay awake. "You really don't," she insisted sleepily.

"I do," he retorted. It was useless. She was already asleep. He sighed, and kept speaking anyway. "The fact that you don't want to tell me doesn't inherently mean that I don't want to know," he told her quietly. He stopped, annoyed but aware of the futility of trying to argue with an unconscious person.

He still found himself fascinated by her face when she slept.

He'd noticed it almost an hour into the flight. When she was communicating, verbally or otherwise, her face went through a plethora of tense expressions in the course of a minute. When she slept, it was easier to see.

The first time he'd met her, and most of the time he'd known her in school, he'd been under the impression that she was completely foreign.

It still alarmed him to realize that a person could be so thin that even the appearance of their lips could suffer for it.

Her cheeks had been more obvious. What little weight she'd gained in her face had gone almost exclusively to them, turning her gaunt, narrow face into a more recognizable oval; almost round on the rare occasions when she smiled properly.

She had such tiny, unbelievably thin bones that it had never been immediately obvious how underweight she'd been. Her lean face had looked as though it had always been lean. Her legs- hips and thighs the purveyors of the last vestiges of fat on her, knees so narrow naturally that they barely broke the line from ankle to pelvis- had looked as though they'd always been almost ramrod straight. Her ribs had never jutted; they'd just sat uncomfortably close under the skin, like living braille.

She'd never looked sick. Except for her face, she'd almost looked like a child. When she'd started to gain weight, only a tiny amount before she'd left, it had all seemed to go directly to her hips.

Now, after what he supposed were four years of relatively consistent eating, a more fundamental change had occurred.

Where they'd once sat when she'd been thin, naturally apart in the centre, pulled slightly outwards by the loss of volume, her lips had flushed out into a more recognizably Asiatic bow. Now, as she slept, they were firmly closed, the lushness of the flesh increasing closer to the middle rather than sitting uniformly across.

Looking at her, he finally saw the mixed aspect. Before, she'd just looked like a somewhat peculiar-faced foreigner, tiptoeing the line of homeliness and attractively unusual.

Now, she'd gently pushed over into the more average territory of creditably pretty; even somewhat striking, counting the addition of her prematurely white hair.

He thought about her protests. " '_At the very least…' _" he repeated thoughtfully, and eyed one of the thin remaining strips of black hair that had come loose from around her ear.

He wondered if she'd ever realized that his initial attraction to her had never weighed on her sometimes disturbingly prepubescent appearance.

He wondered if she'd ever been self-aware or body-conscious enough to realize that she _had_ sometimes appeared disturbingly prepubescent.

Jennifer was waking up again.

She glowered at him under heavy lids. "…And what are you staring at?"

He smirked, but it wasn't meant unkindly. "None of your business."

She rolled her eyes lazily back at him. Some of the redness of broken capillaries in her sclera had faded with sleep. The blueness of the light from the windows made them look starkly white. The shiny black hairs of her eyelashes kept shivering as her eyelids threatened to fall again.

She shifted on the seat, tucking one leg underneath her and shooting the other out to hang just short of the floor. She uncrossed and recrossed her arms, squeezing her eyes shut tightly and opening them wide to try and wake herself.

They started to fall again anyway, and she squirmed, pulling her loose leg back up onto the seat again.

She'd started humming quietly through her nose.

He didn't know the name or the words, but he knew the song.

He'd always heard it whistled, and always accompanied by the sound of heavy boots on the marble. The high notes had echoed off of the ceiling and the stairs, worming their way into every room in the room like a warning.

He resisted the urge to sink into dark reminiscence.

"Jennifer," he interrupted, trying and failing to keep the sharpness from his voice. Her eyes flicked open in response. She stopped humming, groggily attentive.

He didn't know what to say, and when he didn't say anything, she quirked a heavy eyebrow at him. "What?"

He snorted wryly.

"None of your business."

_(No Evidence Available)_

The drive back from the airport was uneventful. His chauffeur shifted the limousine into park, nestled close between the lines in the company parking lot, just minutes past noon.

Jennifer frowned over at him. "Work, work, always work," she grumbled sceptically, but it almost sounded like a question.

He sent her a disparaging glance of his own. "We came back early for this reason," he told her. "There are always things that require my attention."

As he stepped out of the car, he saw her roll her eyes in his peripheral vision. She was muttering something cynical under her breath, but followed obediently.

It was, as he had expected, exactly as he had left it. The receptionists murmured respectfully upon his entrance, and sent the woman lurking a few steps behind their characteristic varied glances of amusement and suspicion.

Tadashi Kimura, his head of security, was waiting for him at the elevators. Kimura's tense look and unwelcoming glances towards the recently abandoned _Mrs._ Nakamura told him that he wanted to speak to him- And privately.

Jennifer looked over, visibly startled for a second when he suddenly stepped away.

He left her mashing the 'call elevator' button in her usual frenetic manner.

The lobby was a mess of people waiting or moving, entering and leaving stairwells, elevators, and rooms. The light granite floors gleamed under a thin sheen of dust and degrading black streaks of shoe-sole rubber.

It wasn't a place for talking about private matters.

Kimura lead him away hastily, looking back carefully over his shoulder. Kaiba frowned. _'Of course: To ensure that no one is close enough to overhear. What's happened?'_ he wondered, and followed him out of the lobby into the surveillance room. _'Is it the missing design team members? Nakamura?' _

'…_Has Mokuba done something imbecilic?'_

It wasn't Mokuba.

He knew that much because when he stepped into the surveillance room, an unattended Mokuba was sitting on the photocopier, arms crossed indifferently, watching him with a grim, unreadable expression.

Kimura gestured for him to sit. He complied, frowning at the tense atmosphere.

"_Sir_," Kimura said seriously. Kaiba wondered if it made him completely insane to be immediately reminded of his long-neglected companion, _AppSpo_. He shoved the thought aside when the security leader continued to speak.

"I apologize for the amount of time we had to take in analysis," he started, and Kaiba frowned again. Apologies were always a bad sign. "But we had to be sure that we'd effectively gathered all possible information regarding this matter before acting. This is strictly within the company at the moment. It was decided that you should be consulted before anything is done."

Kimura stopped, sighed, and gritted his teeth before starting again. "We found something very interesting in our sweep of Ueda's office."

Kaiba didn't like his equally grim look of tense expectation.

"We don't know where they were stored previously, but we found a series of security tapes in Ueda's desk. Old tapes." He paused, firing up one of the inactive screens. "The tapes are all from the same day. Different parts of the building, but all of the same subject."

His stomach dropped in blank shock. He spoke, urgently, even rudely, without realizing. "When?"

Another anxious hiss through his teeth. "If you'll excuse me, I believe you already know that."

He did. He gestured impatiently for Kimura to continue.

The security head started the tape silently.

It was a seven year old recording; old enough that it had been recorded before the security cameras had been replaced with ones that recorded sound, as well. The tape was silent, black and white and slightly grainy, only punctuated by the rising and falling hiss of the ribbon moving inside the machine.

A Mokuba just months younger than eleven was standing in his office- _'Gozaburo's office, it was his then'_- shoulders bunched defensively up around his ears.

Seto Kaiba sent his brother, still perched on the photocopier, a puzzled look. _'I never knew that you were in his office that day. This __**is**__ the day I took the company, isn't it?'_

His adopted father was pacing, gesturing roughly with large hands, heavy eyebrows lowered in a look of snide dismissal. He could faintly see the end of the cigar he always kept tucked in his coat pocket- _'red. That suit was red'_- and the rich smell of the unburnt tabacco was still fresh to him, cloying in his mouth and nose.

Ten-year-old Mokuba was edging backwards towards the door. Gozaburo whirled towards him, sneering, and the young boy flinched.

He could almost hear his adoptive father's hard laughter.

Mokuba had edged far enough back that he was almost off of the screen.

Kimura indicated him on the screen with an odd sense of urgency. "Watch carefully." Behind him, the real, living Mokuba snorted derisively.

There was movement. Kaiba leaned closer.

A hand, recognizably. A hand in Mokuba's hair, ruffling it familiarly, the casual touch of a friend or an overconfident stranger. The young boy jerked, half-turning, obviously startled. The hand was gesturing expressively. Mokuba looked at someone out of sight, muttered something, looked over his shoulder with nervous ferocity, and bolted out of sight of the camera.

The rest of the person shifted into view, adjusting its stance to better face the man in the red suit.

"That's impossible," he said automatically, but he knew already better.

Something neat and methodical inside of his brain had already sorted and stacked all of the reasons why it wasn't.

_A breeze of whimsical madness, and the practical thought that it didn't really matter, not three years after the fact. "Have you ever pushed anyone out of a window?" _

_Wide eyes in the early evening light, enraptured by surprise, looking up at him from on the dark bedspread. _

Long, dark hair, in tamer waves than he'd ever seen it. A body that was slim, but not gaunt. Not yet.

Distinctively cocky posture, tiny bone structure, tight, hyper-expressive gestures.

Even from behind, it was still Jennifer.

Undeniably.

A seventeen-year-old Jennifer Nauswell was standing in his adopted father's office.

She was talking heatedly, her shoulders and wrists jerking in a way so flatly typical of her when she was upset that he couldn't even question it.

Gozaburo Kaiba was laughing, his hands tucked dismissively in his pockets, the left moving restlessly under the coat fabric, toying with the cigar. Unconcerned. Unthreatened.

Jennifer ran a hand through her hair, paced restlessly, and turned her back on him. Her face was only visible from a deep angle, but lurking there was a desperation, too close to defeat, there that he found intimately familiar.

Much too familiar.

_"I brought my best friend, my only friend, to Japan three years ago." _

That flat, almost sociopathic look, desperately unemotive. It was the look of someone who knew absolutely that they had no longer had anything to lose. It was the slight imbalance of somehow who would rather go out tearing with her torn, useless fingernails and screaming foul enough profanities to ruin one more child's volcabulary than die, quiet and dignified, alone.

_"When I was at work, she was brutally raped in our apartment by someone looking for me."_

Gozaburo had started to talk.

_"The pills? I really only started taking them consistently after I got back from my first trip."_

The evening light from the picture window set his aggressive, taunting motions in high-contrast relief. Hands drawn from pockets, held wide in mocking innocence. The crooked leer of a sadistic smile. Slow articulation of a silent word, and then a final, closed-mouth sneer.

_"She killed herself. Jumped off of the balcony."_

Two things happened at once.

Gozaburo Kaiba drew the cigar from pocket to mouth and flicked open his lighter. The light gleamed off of the slick silver casing in a single fast sweep across the camera.

What was visible of Jennifer's face seized into an expression of insane rage and hate.

"_She didn't die until she reached the hospital; they told me her spine had doubled up- literally, folded like origami-"_

She'd turned and charged before either of them could react; neither the black and grey Gozaburo with his just-lit cigar nor his grey-faced adopted son sitting stock-straight in his chair.

Her tiny black and white hands closed on the lapels of his suit jacket, light spots against desaturated scarlet. Her battered sneakers pushed hard into the lush carpet with seemed like singular intent.

The picture window glass sent out an explosion of spiderweb cracks, hovering in limbo for an instant of eternity before bursting out into the sky.

_Those gleaming green eyes, surrounding by the cold-sweat face of an addict in withdrawal, wide with what he had assumed was nervous interest._

_"__I fell out of a window once." _

Something in his sinuses was buzzing, incoherent, constantly repeating _'she didn't lie. She never answered the question.'_

Both of them tumbled out of the window like inept rocketeers from a half-packed canon. Her fingers slipped from the lapels of that red coat in a tiny motion that parted the two of them, making them nothing but a snapshot of black shadow-puppets against the sky.

They plummeted out past the lower edge of the window and out of sight.

"That's impossible," he found himself repeating. The world seemed abruptly both much too close together and much too far apart. "She would have died. It's impossible."

It was all that he could think to say.

The moment in which the words _"she couldn't" _had formed on his tongue, they'd faded into nothing but a gritty, bitter taste.

She could.

He knew she could.

It was _exactly_ the sort of irrational reaction that always occurred to her first.

It was _exactly_ the kind of irrational, self-destructive feat that appealed to her the most.

Kimura was moving beside him. His fingers swept out from the edge of existence to the rewind button.

The image started moving backwards in leaps and jerks that sent the glass back into its previous immaculate state and a seventeen-year-old Jennifer backing quickly out of the room. When he started it again, ten-year-old Mokuba was fidgeting defiantly in Gozaburo's office. "I'd like to direct your attention to this scene. If you'll look_-_" he started and then made a strangled noise.

Turning felt as cumbersome as walking in waist-deep _Helheim_ mud.

An almost twenty-four-year-old Jennifer was lingering in front of the door, holding it very slightly ajar behind her.

She was staring at Mokuba with an expression of enlightened amazement. "I _knew_ that you seemed familiar. I'd completely forgotten about you. I _knew_ that I had seen you before," she told him emphatically. She looked like she was hovering somewhere between laughter and shock. The door shut with a heavy, obstrusive _clack_ as she released it. The whir of the old ribbon in the machine seemed to fill the entire room. "You knew me."

She was staring at him with something more complex than fascination.

"I kept wondering why you liked me so much. _You recognized me_. That's why. You knew."

Mokuba's mouth was set in a determined line. "Of course. I love you," he told her doggedly.

She actually did laugh at that.

She raised her hands up slowly in front of her, both sheepishly and inoffensively, like a caught criminal. "I believe you now." Her expression suddenly grew wry and quiet. "But I didn't do it for you, kid."

Kimura looked like he was considering radioing for support. His creeping, surreptitious movements attracted her shifting attention.

Her eyes immediately snapped from him to the screen, and she laughed again, but it came out tense and sharp. "I remember this part," she said softly, and reached past the security head to rewind it again.

A teenaged Jennifer Nauswell was standing in his adopted father's office again. She'd just turned away. The real Jennifer chuckled darkly beside his face, and straightened up.

Her posture had abruptly changed. When Gozaburo began speaking on the screen, she began to imitate his voice and manners with a precision that made his skin crawl.

"If you had seen for yourself," she said, drawing out the deep, sneering lilt of her voice, "the enticing manner in which she invited me in, or the affectation of innocence she maintained until the end, you would know that you _owe no duty _to whores, _Oshibka._"

She drew out the last word like a snarl.

She knocked a cigarette from the pack in her pocket and lit it, casually fumbling with her lighter. The light from the screen was replaying a mirror of the scene on her face, distorted by the soft expulsion of smoke from her mouth.

She watched herself tumble out of the window again.

With an appearance of remarkable indifference, Jennifer started to whistle.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	10. Chapter 10

_**Note:**__ So here we go. Hopefully you're still with me- I'm still seriously terrified that you'll all just go "Nope. Too outlandish, even for __**you**__, Kiski." But lovely second wife __**Kherandihr**__ is apparently 100% on the bandwagon with her 100 Proof Pure Distilled S.K., cask strength (matured in charred oak, maybe?) so I've got my fingers crossed that I managed to swing that little bout of improbability._

_Which, by the way, I've been planning for a million billion years, since it first occurred to me at age seventeen, but I still feel like I didn't make it convincing enough to anyone but me._

_**Kherandihr**__, your friend from high school needs to develop some taste before she judges. Pfft, spirits. _

_On the level of spirits (both alcoholic and otherwise) I was a Yami no Bakura fan for years, and read and wrote a plethora of terrible fanfiction. I also drank Vex despite hating it and Blue Curacao from the bottle despite the fact that it made me sick._

_Then I wrote Simply Biological, had actual relationships, and came to the startling realization that I'm irresistibly fascinated by tall, dark-haired, argumentative men, and now I'm all for 100 Proof Pure Distilled cask-matured Seto Kaiba, served with a tumbler of fine Canadian Rye and Canada Dry Ginger Ale, a nice light, non-acidic lager (maybe Stella Artois or Heineken) or, if I want something sweet, a nice tiny tot of good old Canadian maple whiskey._

_Taste improves with age. In a __**lot**__ of ways._

_Edit: Lovely first wife __**WandererRaen **__and third wife__** HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto **__are __in tow; we don't need nobody else to ride this trainwreck out to the very last stop, screaming metal and coal smoke galore. _

_Double-Edit: Emi, Emi, Emi. __**Petra**__Emi__**Pan**__. Sweet Jesus Christ, it's really weird having someone who I actually know EYE ARR ELLLLLL review. _

_Triple-Edit: Another super-fucking-long chapter for you! …Except, this is one scene. One enormous scene. ONE HUGE SCENE._

_I really hope it's not impossible to read._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Still didn't kill him. Maybe now you'll find out... OH WAIT. You __**have**__ found out who did it! OH SNAP, BITCHES. (Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Ten_

He'd locked her in one of the interview rooms until he could compose himself.

Though his still wildly palpitating heart felt like it was either going to fail at any moment or explode the next, it wasn't his only symptom; his lungs, his windpipe, his _spine_- It all felt like it was trying to force its way through his diaphragm in a bloody spray of pure, unrelenting shock.

He hesitated with his hand on the doorknob, still at a loss- not for courage, but for words.

He'd never actually given much thought to what he was would say or do to his stepfather's killer. He'd always assumed that the process of discovery would be slow, would build, that he would have time to assess and recount, and to draw an acceptable conclusion.

It had never occurred to him that it would happen so _suddenly_.

It had never occurred to him that he would know the person beyond a cursory sense.

It would never have occurred to him that of all of the people in the world, of the hundreds that had had access to the building, of the thousands that had hated him, of the millions in their country alone- In a colossal coincidence so massive that the improbability alone had its own gravitational pull, it was _her_.

Of all people, it was an unknown, socially dysfunctional teenaged prodigy from a low-income Middle-Western American town with no connections, no power, and no interest in business.

And, like a gaudy flourish on top of that unbelievable chance, she'd come back, and of all of the people in the entirety of Japan that she could have formed an attachment to, it had been _him_, through an event that was wholly unlikely on its own.

'_Why?'_ he asked himself suddenly. There were thousands of them, but he finally had one narrowed out: a question to start with.

He opened the door.

She was sitting with her hands folded in front of her, lingering on the wrong side of the stained pine desk, for all the world as though she were waiting for an interviewee- or a court hearing.

The room was much too bright, and it glared off of the oval lenses of her glasses, throwing light spots across the table. They kept the interview rooms bright to discomfit the easily distracted, and now it was burning not at his attention, but at his raw eyes.

He looked away from her, closing the door quietly behind him, trying to get his mouth working in tandem with his mind. A large section of his consciousness was buzzing blank in absolute refusal to believe.

She was waiting for him to ask. He gritted and started, despite how alien the question sounded in his mouth.

"Why did you come back?"

She looked startled, and then confused. "Which time?"

For a second, her returning question puzzled him. He set his jaw, trying not to get distracted by superfluous details. "There are only three times, including now?" he clarified. She nodded once, slowly, still watching him intently. Her expression hovered between polite blankness and the pretence of pleasant humour. "The second time."

From the way her eyebrows furrowed together, he almost thought that she still didn't understand. She started muttering, half to herself, and looked back up at him with her lips pushed together like someone contemplating a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle.

"The second time…" she muttered. "That's… for school, and…" She stopped.

Jennifer let out a deep, whooping sigh.

"I think this will be a lot easier if I start from the beginning. It doesn't really make any sense taken out of order," she said firmly, and then flicked out half-curled fingers towards the empty chair across from her. "In which case… we're going to be here for a while." She sent him a tiny, crooked smile. "I'm bad for drifting. But I'll try. And if I don't, you won't hesitate to correct me," she inserted drily.

He sat reluctantly. Muscles were jumping with nervous adrenaline all throughout his body, and sitting felt tedious.

She leaned back in her chair, sliding forward, folded thin hands on her stomach, and started.

"I met Ceri Moreau when I was in senior kindergarten. My family had just moved for the first time since leaving Okinawa- across the province, to a little rural town north of Kingston- and the school was less than three blocks from my house. I was five; she was seven. She'd been held out of school for a year, and she was a January baby, so she'd been placed late anyway. She was a sick kid, always in and out of the hospital, right up until she hit… maybe… eight or nine. Even after that, she was always too delicate for anything too physical."

When he went to interrupt, she stopped him and smiled apologetically. "It's relevant, I promise." She ran a hand back through her hair. The too-bright lighting made stray pieces of it glow like tiny lights of their own.

"Ceri and I probably only became friends in the first place because we were both so different from everyone else there. I was new, I was poor, I didn't know anyone, and… I was… _me_." She sent him a wry, knowing look. "Ceri was older than the rest of us, she was adopted, and, well… she was black. The only black student in the entire school. Maybe the only non-mixed black person actually living in the entire town."

Jennifer looked down at her fingers, frowning.

"She'd been adopted straight of a Toronto slum. Her adopted parents wouldn't say it out loud, but I'm almost certain that her mother was negligent, maybe even an addict. I know she was adopted at one-and-a-half, and she was in pretty rough shape when they got her- her health never really improved to the level that it should have."

She shook her head suddenly, sharply, and looked at him with an expression of strange intensity.

"I still remember… being so _amazed_. It sounds horrible, but… I'd seen black people before, but her skin was like coal. It was _so_ dark. Everyone else looked the same to me- we didn't have money for an optometrist, so we didn't even know that I needed glasses until I was eleven- they were all the same vague browns and blondes, the same colours on all of them, Irish and English peaches and cream, Spanish tan, Italian olive. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." She ducked her head, laughing a little in embarrassment. "And Ceri was so unbelievably full of life. She was so obnoxious, even then; absolutely determined that one day everything was going to go her way."

Her distant, nostalgic manner made something under his ribs twist.

She chewed her lip, eyebrows furrowed together again. "She was always convinced that even if she couldn't actually be a princess, one day, she'd live like one. She'd find her own prince. She carried that with her… heh, well… for the rest of her life. Even at nineteen, she was still so naïve. She was so fucking _trusting_."

Her face suddenly convulsed, and she took off her glasses to scrub at it. They cast white ovals of reflected light on the light wood of the desk in front of them.

The slim girl jerked a shoulder up to compose herself, shook her head roughly, and started again.

"I switched schools halfway through the school year; my mother put me in French immersion on the pretext that I should be able to speak with my French relatives. The truth of the matter was that I already spoke French almost perfectly with her. My mother… is… somewhat xenophobic."

She quirked a sad smile at him, pushing her glasses in a circle on the table with her finger.

"She's racist, if we're speaking frankly. My mother still believes that Ceri is responsible for everything that's wrong with me." The words came out humourously dry, but there was something deeply pained in the way she held her mouth awry. He looked away quickly. "Even when I was in the French school, Ceri was always over. My dad is… a lot more reasonable. He liked her; if I had her over when my mom wasn't around, he never mentioned it. I think he was just glad that I had a friend at all." She let out a soft, humming sigh. "We moved again before my eleventh birthday, this time to the United States- to a little town in Nebraska where an old friend of my dad's ran an _'Auto Clinic'_." She threw him another wry look. "It was a chop shop. We lived beside a junkyard, in a one-floor, two-bedroom house. My bed was in the hall closet."

He could see it vividly; her strange and instantaneous aspect of comfort in small spaces, cramped by too much furniture in a tiny apartment, but content nonetheless, as though nothing was more natural.

His imagination whirred and clicked like an old projector, pulling up a likely image of blankets and pillows piled and folded strategically on the floor- always immaculately, he knew that it drove her _insane_ to have to sleep in a mess- formed into some semblance of a proper bed, just visible under the bottom shelf.

She was turning and squeaking the toe of her shoe against the tile.

"We moved again, after about a year and a half, when the shop was closed down for illegal operations, and then again two years after that, when a local teacher took too much interest in me and started talking about having me skip to a higher academic level. My dad may be more reasonable than my mom, but he's still ignorant. He doesn't trust intellectuals. He believes that the more education a person has, the more likely they are to swindle you."

Jennifer shifted in her seat, adjusting the way the band of her jeans sat over her stomach.

"We moved across state lines a couple of years after that, to Colorado. My family's still there- it's the longest we've ever lived in one place." She paused, regrouping, and then smiled a little. "No matter where we were living, Ceri came to stay with us every time she had an excuse, and sometimes when she didn't. My dad shouldered out my mother's protests until she learned to ignore us- Ceri was there every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every Easter, every birthday, and any time she could get away during the summer. Her parents were upper-middle-class and took good care of her, but when they had a little boy of their own, they became distant. They funded anything she wanted to do, no explanation required, because that was enough to keep her happy. It just made her naivety worse. She really had no experience to learn from. It was school, my house, or hers."

Her lips pulled together in a tight, contemplative line.

"Ceri… she was absolutely enraptured by the idea that I'd been born in Japan. She was so _into_ things being fated that she took it as an indelible sign that we simply _had_ to go. So we learned to speak proper Japanese together until we were both fluent enough- though I already spoke it in bits and pieces, we always used English or French in my house- but we were still both much, much too young to go alone. So, when she hit fifteen, she came up with something else, just for us."

Her expression became suddenly both very fond and very exasperated.

"The name 'Ceri' is only unusual because it's spelt with a 'C'- she would always get so frustrated when other people spelt it 'Kerry' or 'Keri'. At fifteen, she somehow found out that 'Ceri' is derived from the Welsh word _caru_, which means 'loved'." She tilted her head back, looking away in sudden shyness. "Sometime between there and the next time that she called me, she found out that 'Jennifer' is a derivative of the Welsh name _Guinevere_… meaning 'fair one'. Specifically: referring to colour. I hadn't started to dye over my greys yet, and I already a pretty significant amount. It was just too perfect for her."

She chuckled companionably to no one in particular.

"She decided that we had to learn Welsh. She wanted it to be our language- and it was. We used it to talk over the phone, to say things in front of my parents that we didn't want them to hear."

She suddenly gave him a soft, sly look from under her eyelashes.

"It was the language we used for all of our secrets."

He couldn't stop himself from feeling a little disconcerted by that. It made him wonder.

She started talking again before he had decided if he wanted to ask.

"When Ceri turned nineteen, I was still only seventeen. I wasn't turning eighteen until the next summer, and she was beyond her patience; she didn't want to wait anymore, but I was still too young to travel legally without a guardian. My parents didn't care if I went, but if I was going, I was going alone."

Her look suddenly became mischievous.

"Unless you count stealing from an unattended junkyard, it was the first crime I ever committed."

She started to chew her nails, eyes everywhere but on him.

"I filed for a fraudulent passport. It was… really, really risky, but it worked. I think I once told you that I was constantly amazed by what people threw away, and I meant it. I was so used to junkyards that they were my first reaction. People just leave things in their cars, even when they're towed or turned in… unbelievable things. Wallets. Wallets with identification cards still in them. Birth certificates. Driver's licenses. Insurance papers."

She was chewing her lip again. She slipped her glasses back on, reflective circles travelling towards him along the woodgrain as she raised her head.

"It didn't take me long to cobble something creditable together, and with grey hairs coming in, and my face… I've always been able to look older than I am. Usually, Ceri and I used it to sneak into her sexy romance movies; this time, it was a little more serious, but we never even realized. If I hadn't been so damn cocky going in, talking casually with the passport office workers as though it was the most routine thing in the world, I don't think it would've worked. But it did."

Her glasses sent flashes of light across his eyes. He winced.

"We went."

The room was too warm.

"I was looking into schools, and she was looking for her prince. Neither of us had taken money into account; she had enough from her parents to live alone, but I was with her, and we wanted to live like adults, in an apartment, not a hotel." Another throaty chuckle. "Neither of us had learned how to read or write anything more complex than katakana or the number system. Since we couldn't read and she wasn't a citizen, our job options were pretty limited."

She was looking at the desk, tracing the lines leading into a knot with her nail. Her smile had faded into a dark, unhappy line.

"We ended up working together at an expensive hostess club in Roppongi. We worked with large groups as a pair; two thin exotic foreigners with superficially opposite mannerisms and beliefs, playing social butterfly and ice queen. It was a goddamn stupid gambit, but it was magnetic, and it worked. She made sure that I looked presentable, did my makeup, dyed my roots for me. I made sure they treated her well, never let anyone talk badly to her, and drank all of her drinks because she had no tolerance to speak of. We developed a reputation, the owner billed us as being _'the ultimate hot and cold foreign double act'_, and we started to get regular customers. They were all the same. Fucking crazy rich people who thought 'foreign' equalled 'expensive'. Collector types."

She snorted derisively.

"After a few months, we only had one group, once or twice a week, because they were so high-paying that we didn't need any others. They were all high-level salarymen- long story short, big shots. Big enough that they were all nervous enough to refuse to go by anything other than first names or nicknames." She sneered at nothing. "Some of them loved it; some of them desperately didn't want to be there. None of them had a choice in the matter, including us."

Her eyes traced his face seriously.

"Our very own 'Red Suit' was not someone who ever accepted 'no' as a legitimate answer. Honestly, I think he just dragged them out there, week after week, because the ones who liked it got sloppy and the ones who didn't started to go a little crazy from the stress. I wonder sometimes if there was a business reason for it, but… I'm still pretty sure he just did it because he liked to watch people destroy themselves over nothing."

She snickered abruptly, looking down at the knot in the table again.

"He- 'Gozaburo'? Weird fucking name, so _appropriate_- never gave us any name at all. He almost never used our names, either. He just referred to us by colour- the black one and the white one. Ceri was used to it, I guess. He drove me insane."

Jennifer jeered unpleasantly at the cheap pine.

"Out of the few men there he seemed to treat with some measure of respect, there was one- some skinny black suit- who was always speaking Russian with him. Your adopted father, he had quite the sense of humour- the few times that he called Ceri by her name, he'd call her _Chernyĭ_ . It's just the Russian word for 'black', and if you're speaking quickly, it does sound similar. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get the joke."

Her mischievous looked flitted back.

"I know a few words of lovely mother tongue _Russkiĭ_, and colours seemed to be his thing…so I started calling him _Staryĭ Krasnyĭ._"

She smirked across the table at him.

"It means 'Old Red' in Russian."

A little huff of laughter, and then a crooked look of mixed seriousness and dark humour.

"Red- Goza- I'm sorry, I just can't get used to using his name, _it just sounds so wrong_- Red and I… we hated each other. The more time we spent together, the more each of us understood the other's personality, the more obvious it became how fundamentally incompatible we were. Not explosive, but… a toxic combination, to the point that it affected other people; it was like, together, we produced a deadly gas, making everyone around us steadily more anxious and paranoid, until they finally snapped. We loathed each other to the extent that it was… I don't even have words. We hated each other so much that it almost… looped around back into some sort of morbid affection. There comes a point when hating someone just becomes _funny_- You look at them and are just amazed that they exist at all. The world becomes a little surreal, like you've been sucked into a comic book, and you can't convince yourself that you can ever really get rid of them, because then who would you show down against? Suddenly, you don't have an enemy- you have a supervillain, and there's a certain incredulous fondness that comes with that."

She was quiet for a second. Her fingers pinched white around the thin wire arms of her glasses as she pulled them off again, toying with them restlessly.

"The owner tried to fire me. We were making more money than we knew what to do with, but the way Red and I fought… she told me that we risked losing our highest paying customers. If I wouldn't apologize, if I wouldn't play sweet and subservient for him, I had to leave. And, considering that it is- it _was_- me…"

There was a fly caught somewhere in the circulation. Kaiba could hear it buzzing against metal sheeting, just above the soft hum of the fluorescents. The room was becoming steadily more stifling.

With the stale chemical smell of burning plastic in tow, the air conditioning flared quietly back into life. He was relieved to realize that the heat wasn't just his mounting anxiety.

Jennifer shivered unconsciously in the sudden artificial breeze, bowed lips still pressed into that line of speculative reminiscence.

"He must have forced her to rescind her ultimatum. I left on a Monday, too stubborn to bow out until I was firmly fired, but getting more and more worried about where else I could get a job; I came back on a Wednesday, and she was suddenly silent on the issue. Absolutely closed-mouthed and terrified, like she'd witnessed a murder. And Red kept designating us." She folded her glasses in and turned them on the table with her thumb, until they were parallel with the edge. "So we just kept fighting. I think he enjoyed it. I did, in a way. It was kind of like picking at a big, slow-healing scab; it itched and bled and hurt like hell, but it was strangely satisfying, even knowing that it was going to leave a mark. It felt necessary. Even inevitable. And I don't think I was the only one who felt that way, because it would've been so simple for him to just not come back, to have asked for someone else, or to have let me be fired."

She stopped poking at her glasses, and folded her arms across her stomach.

"After a while, he stopped referring to me as the white one. And he never called me _Belyĭ_, though it would've fit. He started calling me _Oshibka_."

She pulled the corner of her mouth out in a wry grimace.

"It's the Russian word for 'mistake'."

The grimace hardened on her face, rigor-mortis stiff with unhappiness.

"Things started to get crazier after that. He started requesting that we meet the group at outside locations, which is fairly typical in the business, but it made a lot of us nervous; myself included. Honestly speaking, that's probably why he did it. Even the ones who liked coming to see us started to get anxious; I got the impression that most of them had a lot to lose if something popped up in the papers." She was examining her fingernails absently, her face still pulled in that awkward, unhappy expression. "It's still so surreal to me, just being here." Without turning or looking up, she inclined her head towards the lobby outside, and her grimace quirked into something almost like a smile. "I love what you've done with the floor. The brushed steel and gunmetal theme this place used to have never really appealed to me."

He jerked, startled out of the focus of fascination. "You were here? He brought you _here?_" It seemed like something the sometimes reckless and always sadistic Gozaburo Kaiba would do, but it was unfathomable to him. It was so easy to view the acts she described as something distant and unreal- just a personally resonant morality tale, to be learned from but not be affected by- but he was suddenly irrefutably confronted by the immediacy of all of it. She had worked, just districts away, in Roppongi. She had lived on the outskirts of Tokyo, had taken the train, before he'd ever known her.

She'd stood in front of the building they were sitting in, squinting up at the rows of windows, absent-mindedly eying signs in a language that she couldn't read.

Seventeen years old, touting a fake passport, standing in a company parking lot.

'_Seven years.'_

At fifteen, he'd been working and studying at the company almost constantly.

There was a more than distinct chance that he'd been there, grinding his teeth, telling himself to be patient, _'just be patient, just two more shares, I just need two more shares.'_

He reeled and sank back, suddenly exhausted, running a hand down a numb face.

She'd really, actually been _there_, just outside, in the lobby. She'd been there, in his office. In Gozaburo's office.

Just hours after he'd taken the company.

He looked at her, at a loss.

In the overwhelming fluorescents, her pupils had contracted to almost invisible points, and every striated line of dark green under the pale jade of her irises was visible in bright relief.

Jennifer's grimacing smile had faded into a flat, inexpressive look of deathmask smoothness. Behind the lively colours of her eyes, there was an absolute hollowness; an impression of total emptiness, as if behind those flashing capped teeth, pale-bowed lips and carefully painted doll's eyes, there was only the rough pink inside of moulded plastic, time-hardened drips and thin coating of workman's dust invisible to the naked eye.

She started speaking again without him prompting her to. He wasn't sure that she was even really aware that he was still there.

"Tuesdays. In the afternoon, the streets were almost… empty. We never worked on Tuesdays. There was a message from the owner; she said that I'd been requested. No one _ever_ requested me without Ceri. I was curious enough to go, but when I got there, the owner told me that she'd called the wrong phone, left a message on my phone by accident; it was for Ceri, not me."

There was something there, lurking in the emptiness.

"We laughed about it; the one thing we could honestly joke about together was what a terrible hostess I made. She said that the designator was coming back in an hour; plenty of time, no reason to panic. I tried to call Ceri on my way home, but she wasn't picking up."

She almost frowned, but her empty face was too stiff. Something moved behind her eyes, pulling her eyebrows together.

"Ceri was in love with her cellphone. The thing never left her hand; I was always teasing her about it. I told strangers we met that she slept with it pressed to her ear."

The empty face was haunted. There were ghosts living behind the still skin, haunting the jumping muscles beside her eyes.

"When I came out of the subway, I could hear the sirens. There were police everywhere; the ambulance was already loaded. At first, they wouldn't let me into the building. But their faces… that look. When I told them which unit I lived in, they…"

She slid downwards, face still jittering with ghosts, chin thumping down on the table, the lower half of her face hidden in the crook of an elbow, her other arm folded over her head, fingers hanging limp and useless by her cheek.

"I had to identify the body. As her roommate, I was the only one who was qualified to. My identification, my passport- it all said that I was twenty-four. No problem, one adult recognizing another."

Her voice was still strong, flat but audible. Her haunted mind was slipping away from behind those wide, stiff eyes, sliding down into a strange and dangerous place. The muscles in her cheeks started to twitch and jump frenetically.

"Her clothes, they were- but she wasn't bleeding. I thought she was wearing lipstick, at first. Her face… her face was so perfect, but there were marks… on her cheeks, and… he'd been holding so hard that her mouth was bleeding, and it looked like _lipstick_." She was breathing shallowly, staring at nothing, the fingers by her cheek convulsing wildly. "And her skin… it wasn't broken, there were no cuts _anywhere_, but it was all _wrong_. Like… everything had shifted and bunched and there were _bones_ sticking out and her legs were the wrong way but_ her face was perfect _and… I could see that she'd been crying."

There was sudden, miserable life in her eyes. It was deeply pained and ghostlike itself, but full of burgeoning activity nonetheless.

"When they did the preliminary examination, one of the younger officers- a woman, maybe thirty, thirty-five- took pity on me. She told me that she knew it was torture not to know anything… and she told me that what they did know was that she'd been raped prior to her suicide. Violently. They knew she'd jumped, not been thrown. The inside of the apartment was a wreck, but she'd put all the sheets and the couch cushions down the laundry chute, and it'd jammed halfway down. And then she'd jumped. And that phone, _that fucking phone_. She even had it in her pocket when she hit the pavement."

Her entire face convulsed, and she dropped the other arm to cover it, just tufts of white hair sticking up behind them.

The fly had found its way into the room, and was buzzing into the fluorescents. The air conditioning shut off again with a pungent dying sigh.

He could hear her breathing, a shallow and uneven hissing through the teeth, but her voice had gone flat again.

"I didn't know what to do with myself."

A buzz and sharp click of static as the fly found its way inside the light casing, smashing against a hot fluorescent tube.

"Ceri taught me everything I know about not acting like a _freak_. She kept me sane for so long. She was always badgering… so determined that while I wasn't a princess- was never going to be one, shit's impossible, even she knew that- I could still _be_ with people." She giggled distantly, near inaudible.

"She would have been _so_ fucking proud of me if she'd met you. And she would've been _so_ fucking obnoxious about it. We joked about the inevitability of my getting eaten by cats _for years_."

Her giggle faded off into stony silence.

"They dropped it."

The fly was getting sluggish, burning up against the light, but too desperately drawn to it to escape. He almost pitied it.

"It disappeared. The case. Ceri's case. My Ceri Moreau, she just disappeared, just another sick little girl. Suddenly, it had all been consensual. Just plain, typical too-rough sex, good old Christian guilt and a serious chemical imbalance. She'd just been suicidal, they said, sad but true, sometimes it happens. It was alright, it would be okay. Even living with someone, sometimes you don't see the signs, you shouldn't feel responsible- bullshit, bullshit, _bullshit_, from every angle. Rough sex? You couldn't _hug_ Ceri too hard without hurting her." She snorted, and her arm lolled sideways onto the table with a thump. She peered up at him with bloodshot and cynical eyes. "And the lady officer was suddenly nowhere to be found. Maternity leave, they told me. She certainly didn't look pregnant to me. She wasn't even married, though I know that doesn't matter. But it was all there; the pitying looks, the self-disgust- impossible to miss. But they were good at keeping their mouths shut, and there was nothing I could do."

She leaned her cheek against her upper arm, moving her hand to scratch absently at the other wrist, her upper-body still sprawled forward across the desk.

"When I called her family, it was more like a fond pet had died than a person. Just… distant crying, like they didn't want to cry because it would ruin how they looked for the rest of the day. I buried her here, with the money we'd made. I sold our stuff, told her friends, and… I bought a plane ticket home. What else could I do?"

She looked up at him with faint and miserable humour.

The fly had stopped buzzing, either dead or too burnt to fly. The room was silent except for the fluorescents and Jennifer's low, heaving sighs.

He frowned at her, faintly confused. "Then when did you come here? _Why_ did you come here?"

A dark little half-smile.

"It was a whim."

His frown deepened. Something sinister was prickling along his spine and chilling in his intestines. "How? You can't just… walk in."

Her growing smirk said otherwise.

He realized the phenomenal depth of chance that had occurred.

On an average day, walking further into Kaiba Corporation than reception without an appointment would be nigh-impossible. The elevators required card passes just to call them to the lobby.

She'd circumstantially walked in on the one day where the entire company had been thrown into an uproar.

In a stroke of ridiculous luck, Jennifer Nauswell had strolled in at exactly the right time, on exactly the right day, and no one had so much as noticed her.

He stared at her, wondering how it was possible for one person to accidentally invoke such impossible chance so many times.

She sat up, her back popping loudly enough for him to hear, and winced.

"It was a last-minute thought, really. I'd just been… living on auto-rote for weeks, and it was just a few hours before my flight, and thought of just doing nothing, not even looking before I left, was _killing_ me." She slouched back in her chair, pulling a limp arm off of the desk and across her stomach. "The police had been bought off, so I knew it must've been someone with money. _This_ was the only place that I knew any of the collector group worked at, and I figured it was worth it on the off-chance that anyone knew anything at all. I was so numb. I didn't really even think about it. I wasn't even really… looking for our Old Red."

She smiled sheepishly at him, more like a teenaged fast food worker who'd accidentally supplanted pickles for tomatoes than a confessing murderer.

"I just… walked in. People were going crazy; the reception desk was swamped, there were people being dragged out by security- I have you to thank for that, I hear?" She looked distantly amused. "Somebody had just come out of the elevator, and I just… stepped in behind him. I'd automatically assumed that the top floor was fat-cat territory, so I toggled the top floor. But the whole floor was empty, except for Red's office. Your office."

A rising feeling of Dali-esque surrealism was threatening to overcome him.

It was just _too circumstantially bizarre._

She was fidgeting, visibly fighting the urge to toy with her glasses again.

"And Mokuba was there- well, I didn't know that. To me, he was just some loud, angry little Japanese kid that Red was bullying, and I didn't really question that, because terrorizing children was always something I pictured him doing anyway." For the first time since she'd started, her face flickered briefly into something resembling her normal wry humour. "So I told him to get lost, but Red was in a high humour when I tried to ask him if he knew anything and just laughed at me. It was… really only then that I realized what a stupid idea the whole thing had been. Everything just felt so hopeless. And then… he started talking about… having done it."

She looked up at him with a poignant expression of such fresh amazement that something in his ribs tightened in sympathetic response.

"I don't even remember _doing_ it," she said emphatically. "He said it… and then… it was late enough that all around the buildings, the sky was purple and red, but up, straight up… the sky was _so blue_. And that was all that I was thinking about. I don't even… really remember hitting the ground all that well. Just the _sound._ Then I got up. I really think I cracked something, because my ankles and knees have never been the same. But I walked to the corner. I got in a taxi. And… I got on my plane. I'd already paid for it, after all."

He couldn't stop himself from interrupting. "But how did you_ survive?_" he asked her incredulously. "It's over twenty stories up. You should be dead."

Her sudden bright look of haunted mischief told him that he didn't want to know. She told him anyway.

"Do you know what two hundred and fifty pounds of middle-aged flesh hitting pavement sounds like?"

She leaned forward, still bright with poltergeists.

"_I do._"

He couldn't contain his wince.

They sat in mutual silence.

A faint, resilient buzzing started up above him. The fly wasn't out of the running.

He broke the silence with a sigh that was louder than he had intended it to be.

"You still haven't answered my question," he told her firmly. "Why did you come back?"

Her bright look faded into something cooler but no less ghostlike.

"I'd always said I'd study in Japan. I felt like I had to. And… I kind of wanted to get caught." She looked sheepish again, but there was deadness lurking behind her smile. "I just felt like tempting the fates. Here or anywhere else; location doesn't matter. I don't sleep, and I do my best not to think about any of it: Not even her. I do sleep, and I have nightmares, no matter where I'm sleeping. But mostly I just don't sleep unless I know I won't dream."

A soft, distant, dismissive wave.

"So I came here. At the time, I liked to think I was following Ceri's 'everything is fate' self-made voodoo religion for princesses-in-waiting, but in reality, it was just morbid curiousity. I went to school because it was a good idea. I kept up my grades to keep my scholarship so I could pay for my apartment- but only because it was a good idea. I… just wanted to see if I would get caught along the way."

She was quiet.

He adjusted the collar of his shirt, chilling the skin underneath. "I was here," he clarified carefully.

She inclined her head forward affirmatively. "You were here."

His muscles had gone leaden after the adrenaline had burned out of them. He shifted his numb legs, provoking an outburst of prickling pins and needles from foot to thigh. He tried to ignore it.

Her sudden smile was a little deranged.

"You talk like him sometimes."

He didn't know what to say to that.

Her eyes went sharp and shrewd. "Did you ever really hate me?"

The abruptness of that question concerned him. "Not really. You were obnoxious," he answered carefully.

"I hated you."

It was said pleasantly, but she was obviously serious. He stared at her, flabbergasted and fighting a mounting feeling of paranoid suspicion. "And if you'd known…?"

"Yes," she answered immediately. There was no hesitation. She stopped, looked away, and puzzled for a moment. "Unless you mentioned you were adopted… but then… I don't really know if that would have mattered. And you're bigger than me, so I probably wouldn't have gotten very far."

The shrewdness returned in force. She looked sidelong at him, still half-turned to the side.

"There is nothing more repulsive to me than people who hurt children," she said suddenly, still with that strange aspect of pleasantness. "But any child of his? With my fingernails, if I could."

Jennifer started laughing like she'd just told the funniest joke in the world. There was something cold and hateful in it, but he had the strange feeling that it wasn't directed towards him.

After a moment, she tapered off into heavy sighs, and then exhausted and petulant hiccups.

The silence flooded back.

She was looking down, fidgeting her fingers towards her glasses again. "So," she said, flat and unserious. "Are they outside or just on the way?"

He looked at her in blank incomprehension.

She glanced at him and stuck out her tongue in a weird facsimile of indifferent playfulness. "Don't play coy with me, _Mister_ Seto 'Let-The-Police-Handle-It' Kaiba. En route or in house?"

He was puzzled.

_'She thinks I've contacted the police?'_

It was a reasonable reaction under different circumstances, he supposed, but the crime in question was seven years old and the perpetrator considerably more dear to him than the victim.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

Her faux-indifferent look started to fade into something confused and suspicious. "So you haven't called them… yet?"

He shook his head at her slowly, unsure of whether he wanted to be amused, puzzled, or just shocked. "I'm not calling them."

Jennifer looked like she'd missed the punch line.

"What?"

Despite everything, he was starting to lean towards amused. "I'm not calling the police."

Her expression had melted into a pure, unrelentingly _Jennifer_ expression of incredulous wonder. "What?" She mouthed it again, silently, and then squinted. "What? What kind of reaction is that? What _are _you going to do, then?"

She hadn't really given him time to think about it. He raised both eyebrows, suppressing a lost smile. "Probably nothing."

Her face went totally blank for a second.

"Nothing."

"Yes."

"Nothing?"

He nodded. It had solidified in his mind as a probable reaction. Other than his own quiet marvelling or compiling a few additional questions, there wasn't anything he felt a strong compulsion to do in reaction to her revelation.

She'd completely lost her ability to form sentences.

"You… you're just going to… act like… this never… you don't know?" she stuttered incredulously. "This… How does this not change anything?"

He lifted a shoulder dismissively.

The fly had escaped the tube lighting, and was buzzing against the drywall near the vent.

It was a strange sensation.

He'd expected to be assaulted by guilt or anger, at least. In this situation, he'd expected the shocked bursting-heart-and-lungs feeling to never subside.

But it had.

He knew.

She'd done it.

It was her. Of all people, it was her.

And now, he knew.

He had accepted, albeit with his own incredulous wonder.

He felt, bizarrely, unbelievably calm.

Because he had discovered something:

It didn't matter.

Beyond the initial shock, he didn't care.

Regardless of who had done it or why, Gozaburo was dead.

Regardless of what she'd done or why, a murderous Jennifer was still, and fairly typically, his Jennifer.

"It doesn't change anything," he confirmed indifferently.

She stared at him.

"I was right," she said blankly. "You really are an alien."

_(No Evidence Available)-_


	11. Chapter 11

_**Note: **__I seriously wonder how many chapters of this you guys will read. This trainwreck isn't even close to done. This could easily, easily end up being more than 80K words, knowing me. _

_Are you with me all the way?_

_Edit: __**WandererRaen**__ says she is. __**Kherandir**__, if you're ever in the capital of Canada, we'll grab that drink fo' sho', but all fair warning, I tend to talk the same way I write, only faster; just ask __**PetraPan**__, she knows me in person._

_Double-Edit: Heyo, __**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumarSeto**__, I can almost write your whole username now without having to reference it. This trainwreck is going to spew more than smoke, though; there's more than just fire in the engine room. _

_And apparently I just got promoted to god status. Wicked awesome and welcome to the last train to nowhere, __**chromia**__._

_Triple-Edit: FREEEENCH. By popular demand, translation listed below._

_This chapter's not as exciting as some, but I promise there's excitement to come._

_Sorry that this is so late; normally I try to keep up a weekly basis for updates, but shit's been crazy lately._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ UNF! That is the sound of my pelvic thrust. (Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Eleven_

He discovered, too late, exactly _why_ Jennifer had chosen that inopportune moment to seek him in the surveillance room. Relative to the confusion that had consumed the rest of the day, it had seemed like a rather arbitrary question.

As it turned out, it was not.

Someone had been around, asking questions about something they should have known nothing about. They were questions that should have occurred to only a few people- less than he could count on one hand.

Out of those few, he knew who it _wasn't_, and therefore, who it _was_.

Mokuba's long-abandoned imitation certainly wasn't brilliant, but she was more observant than he had recognized.

Her evident interest in the wavelike cadence of media gossip trends had qualified her to notice something that most others, despite being more immediately aware of his routines, had missed.

The police had not been contacted about the disappearances of security officer Minoru Ueda, minor programmers Masao Hamada and Seiji Fujimoto, and contracted artist Toshio Nakamura. The latter three were still listed as _Yggdrasill_ contributors, and the small portion of the interested public who had noticed that the male Nakamura was no longer under Kaiba Corporation employment had easily accepted the revelation that his contract had stipulated a singular, finite exchange.

Those few had not yet noted the recent replacement of the missing male Nakamura with a female Nakamura, as he had not yet drawn up a contract for her, finalizing her position; even if they had, the surname was common enough to provoke nothing more than a few raised eyebrows.

Mokuba's imitation had found herself in a position that granted her a rather unique perspective.

She had been informed of the couple's marital status.

She had noticed, with apparently some interest, that both of the young Kaiba brothers seemed closely acquainted with the fairer half of the Nakamura couple.

She had been aware of the still-persisting gossip about infamous absentee Jennifer Nauswell, and had noted that the fairer half of the Nakamura couple, remarkably familiar to the Kaiba brothers, just happened to bear the same first name.

He wasn't certain that she had _been_ certain about anything.

An untrue rumour could be trusted to blow itself out of existence over a course of days- a month, at most. She would have known that.

If she had approached the media with unsupportable data, her story would have eventually collapsed, falling in on itself- into its own deep and unstable foundation- buried out of sight just hours after the warmth of the limelight reached her.

But he knew.

Even a few hours of fame was still acceptable to an aspiring glory hound.

It was probable that even she hadn't believed her improbable tale.

Unfortunately, improbable as it sounded: She had been, and was, correct.

The front page of the Sunday morning edition of the _Domino_ _Dish_ was in colour; always a sign that they'd sunk their leech-like teeth into something big and bloody.

It was a large, crisp print of a photograph, obviously taken with a proper camera, not a phone, and straight-shot and centred in a way that told him that the person holding the camera had at least some rudimentary proficiency in the trade. Sprawled across the top and bottom of the page were frenetic proclamations of scandal. Down the sides, dots and dashes of what lay within.

Jennifer, still half-perched in the limousine, was rolling her eyes at his back. The flawless noon sky was an idyllic backdrop for a sun that painted the white lines in the company parking lot into the _do not cross _police tape of a crime scene. The lighting was too perfect; the composition too right. It was a patently unaltered photograph, and the subjects in question too recognizable.

Most Domino City tabloid followers intimately knew the sight of him from behind, plain-clothes or in uniform; whatever the benefits, being unusually tall also had the effect of making him almost instantly identifiable. In what was obviously his suit, carrying what was obviously his briefcase, and leaving his limousine in his company parking lot, it was, undeniably, him.

Jennifer, who they'd never managed to scrounge up a photograph of- she'd left school before the second semester, avoiding yearbook pictures and managing to completely escape the notice of the omnipresent yearbook journalists and photographers- should have been exempt from recognition, even sitting in what was visibly his car.

If she hadn't proved to be unexpectedly photogenic, the picture probably wouldn't have run.

They may, like Mokuba's imitation, have intended to run it without believing that the woman in question was the correct Jennifer. The _Dish_ was known to run obviously fallacious articles and altered pictures on a regular basis.

However, where a fallacious article took days to fold surreptitiously down and out of sight, a factual article took just minutes to prove itself correct.

He was struck- again- by the pure ludicrousness she seemed to incur unintentionally with her presence.

Shortly thereafter, he was struck by the sheer quantity of insane bullshit that had just come down on his head.

The top headline read:

_"The Queen of Games!"_

The bottom:

_"Found at Last; Most Avid Player of Hide and Seek!"_

The scattered, titillating Morse Code down the sides:

_"Married! – Employed! – Missing! – Frantic Game of Cat and Mouse!"_

He looked at it blankly, and then winced.

Since her sudden reappearance, she'd fought tooth and claw against having to clarify herself or explain her actions. Preoccupied with that and company matters, he hadn't stopped to consider that the dramatic backlash of her return could be worse than that of her discovery and disappearance.

Then, the tabloids had been filled with frantic proclamations of romance and intrigue; for almost a year afterwards, he'd been treated like the tough-talking but soft-hearted hero of a fifties detective novel, caught in the destructive grip of Japan's new favourite _femme fatale_. Because they'd had nothing to go by but the vague descriptions of his classmates- he certainly hadn't felt much inclined to help- and those were limited to '_thin-pale-black hair-green eyes',_ public interest in her appearance had never really faded enough to die.

Now they knew.

Unfortunately, instead of relieving the pressure of long-held interest, the accompanying details of her reappearance had revived her _femme fatale_ persona in full force.

He considered it, and winced again.

She was married.

Coincidentally, her husband had disappeared from the public eye shortly after her return.

To the uninformed observer, that had a lot of implications, all of them sinister.

She worked for him.

Coincidentally, in the position her husband's sudden absence had vacated.

To the uninformed observer, that raised a lot of questions, all of them sinister.

She was Jennifer.

She was _the_ Jennifer.

_The _Jennifer had killed his foster father.

His mind abruptly blanked.

There was a distant twinge of concern.

He knew better than to assume that she knew how to handle the press. He knew that she could keep her mouth shut- and would with characteristic tenacity- but he also knew that she didn't handle people well.

She didn't really _handle_ people at all. Handling people was not Jennifer's forte, never had been, and probably never would be.

A large, loud, pushy _group_ of people, all of whom had a deep contempt of personal space and social boundaries…

_'Oh, fuck.'_

He heard Mokuba drop something downstairs, and had more than a sneaking suspicion that he knew why.

His brother was already halfway across the foyer when he hit the bottom of the stairs. His normally warm complexion was ashen, making his eyes dark, anxious pits in a usually lively and mischievous face. Despite the late hour of the morning, he was still in just loose pyjama pants and socks, mussed long hair- he still couldn't get him to cut it, but normally it was at least_ brushed_- the token of the family's late riser.

The first Mokuba said on seeing him was, "That fucking _bitch._"

He didn't have to ask who he was referring to. Gratifyingly, Mokuba seemed to know that he didn't have to explain, either, an act of instinctual familial trust that he'd been deprived of for a very long time. Instead, he immediately launched into a tirade that was equal parts aghast and enraged.

"It's been on for _hours,_" he ranted, half-running ahead towards the living room before stopping to look back impatiently at his brother's more leisurely stroll. "Megumi's interview is from last night, but they must have sent someone around to the apartment building at, like, _six-_" an impossibly early proposition for his brother, Kaiba thought with amusement "-and they've been running the same five minutes of footage _every hour_."

Mokuba was at the point of shoving him to move him into the room faster. He maintained his pace.

He was in no hurry to see what havoc she'd wrought.

The television was on, sound running low. The pungent smell of burning sugar was wafting from the kitchen. Mokuba, who'd been impatiently toying with the remote, jamming up the volume level, swore abruptly and dashed into the other room.

He heard the bright hiss of steam as cold water hit hot metal, and thought vaguely about reprimanding him for potentially damaging the kitchenware.

In Hepburnesque silver-screen largesse, a barrel-curled and flush-lipped imitation Megumi was chattering animatedly with someone, long legs crossed over the sleek black leather of an interview chair. She was in the midst of explaining the force of intuition and brilliance that had led to her titillating discovery, and he discovered something else. He wasn't the only showman attending their dark party.

Cocking a sweet-laced metaphorical Sunday hat over her curls, Megumi Shinohara had stepped shrewdly and skilfully into the difficult but laudable role of _she's a tough dame_, thereby perfecting the cast list of their blockbuster noir. Like any good opera or play, they had their players in place, their audience in rapture, and the playbill read thus:

He, the hard-nosed but soft-hearted gumshoe.

She, the alluring but murderous femme fatale.

He, the loyal but dim-witted partner.

She, the sweet but no-nonsense dame.

He, the last gasp-inducing twist in a long and winding alley, the fingerprint on the doorknob, the last word on the last page, tying the yet-undetected knot of connection: the unmissed victim.

Sunday-hat ostrich feathers in their best proud display, _tough dame _Megumi laughed through surround-sound speakers and smiled slyly at a camera lens. The interview ended, fading back to an excitable host who talked and laughed like a machinegun.

Mokuba had managed to quell the smoke in the kitchen, but the fire in television was burning with too much tenacity for just cold water and curses.

The machinegun-mouthed host cut to the next hourly instalment of every family's favourite femme fatale, literally fatal and fatally literal.

She was in unusually pretty form that morning, a spectacle unbespectacled, fantastically made up but decidedly not fantastical, outfitted against the morning chill in the sort of high-collared, dark and militantly severe coat that he knew appealed to her mathematical sensibilities. Double-breasted, as befitted her want for symmetry, a double-row of brushed pewter buttons gleamed low in the yellow light of the apartment hallway. The pale green floral wallpaper backed her like a painting, marking the lines of her clothing and the hard square edges of the black folder she was carrying, neatly emblazoned with the name of a bank in lower Domino.

Head held slightly up and back, shoulders pulled square over a body that was arched perceptibly away, her expression- of both body and face- was one easily confused for a coquettish sort of enigmatic contempt. The yellow-white sheen of artificial light made her skin as white and translucent as her hair and the matte black and silver of her coat as sombre as the paint on a hearse. Only the soft peach of her lips and the clear green of her eyes- made livid by the endless green wallpaper around her- lent punches of colour, turning them into almost mesmerizing focal points. She couldn't have fulfilled her standing public image more clearly without donning the rich merlot lipstick of the Rita Hayworths and Greta Garbos of lore.

He had to resist the urge to run his hand down his face in exasperation. He knew better than to assume that any of it- from her appearance to her posture- was intentional.

He knew that posture intimately. It meant one very simple thing, and asked one very simple question: _"Why are you so close to me?"_

As for her unusually brushed and pressed appearance, he assumed that was more related to the bank folder that she was carrying than any other motive; the always habitual and sometimes methodical Jennifer would have carefully considered the implications of showing up in a state of unerring mess to a bank staff that only knew her to be neat and staid.

The sleek-haired hallway reporter with her microphone held forward was less publicity machinegun and more media artillery, firing heavy-weighted question after question without pausing for response.

Jennifer was just looking down at her under lids heavy with bewilderment and steadily mounting annoyance, fingers clenched white around the edge of the folder.

It took almost a minute and half for the reporter to cease her invasive rounds of scorched-earth questions. When she finally tapered off, it was with a sudden Morse code stop more typical of how the press wrote than how they were meant to speak. She stood in silence, microphone still held out in unequivocal expectation.

The visibly nonplussed target of her questions was just looking at her, expression gradually working itself into a state of puzzled revulsion.

They were quiet for so long that the cameraman shifted uncomfortably, jostling the camera, earthquake-style, for a moment.

Jennifer's lips parted almost imperceptibly, exposing the white glisten that only capped teeth or unbelievable genetics could lend a mouth, grind-worn as hers was.

"You," she started softly, shifting backwards in a graceless little shuffle, "are the reason that contraceptives were invented."

With that, she retreated, slowly and warily, back to her apartment door, and paused there, looking back at the still-speechless artillery-woman with the microphone. Her eyes were bright and compelling in the generous light, pools of broken-bottle green in an alabaster face.

"Please inform your mother that I am deeply disappointed by her lack of vigilance," she told her politely, and then disappeared behind a serious of loudly clicking locks.

The whole room darkened as the clip ended, fading back to the more moderately-lit reporting room with the machinegun host. Mokuba was watching his reaction with a mixture of nervous anger and hesitant amusement.

He wasn't sure when he'd put his hand over his mouth, but it was there. He pulled it away and looked at it, feeling distantly puzzled. Something was twisting inside his lungs, unsure of how to escape.

He thought about it.

"That could have been worse," he told his brother decisively.

Mokuba just laughed.

_(No Evidence Available)_

A biblical plague had come for her.

It was consuming her domicile.

The locusts were coalescing into a hateful cloud outside her door, a multitude of buzzing wingbeats so in tune that sometimes they almost sounded like voices. She knew better. It was the song of the parasite, trying to lure her out, telling her to the open the door.

She knew better than to do that.

Jennifer had decided with conviction that given her choice of plagues, she preferred the blight of starvation to the alternative- violent consumption, alive and screaming at her threshold.

'_I always forget the lamb's blood,' _she thought, vaguely nettled.

Suddenly, there was buzzing inside the apartment; rhythmic pulsation _inside the room_. She jerked forward, alarmed, and then shook herself.

It was a mechanical buzzing, not an entomological one.

'_Telecommunications device of that which is the __τῆλε __φωνή; the voice from afar is calling me,'_ she thought intensely, and strove to calm her skipping mind. _'Telephone. It's just the phone.'_

She clambered forward and scrabbled at the buttons, trying to remember which one was to pick up and which was to put down. Her sense struggled at the concept of being able to do either without actually moving the object in question, and she mashed at the keys with her thumbs.

The comfortingly low, human voice emanating from the tinny speaker sounded annoyed, but not surprised.

_"Nauswell, stop that."_

She flung her hands back and leaned close to it, staring at the tiny, ill-lit screen, neatly printed with the words: **Final Boss**.

A moment of feigned thought for no one in particular. It just made her feel better to pretend that she was functioning correctly.

"I am under siege," she told the _bossphone _seriously. There was a distant whisper of exasperated laughter.

_"I know. Can you leave your apartment?"_

She feigned thought again, despite having decided her answer shortly after bolting the door, and then stopped in genuine consideration.

Metaphysically speaking, it was a difficult question to answer.

She hunkered down in front of the phone again, frowning. "No. They're outside my door," she told it sensibly, and paused. "I think they want my flesh."

Another little snort.

_"I have no doubt that you're correct."_

Another frown pulled at her cheeks. "You're not helping, _Bossman_," she chastised.

A breathy, metallic _phone-sigh_.

_"Get your things together._ _I'm coming up."_

She heard a strangled noise and realized with a distinct lack of fondness that it was hers. "You can't let them in," she protested.

It was too late.

The phone was just a phone. It was buzzing static. **Final Boss** was no longer possessing it, and it was the _bossphone_ no longer.

She swore, and cast around for things that seemed essential. She was still struggling for coherence, but the vertigo-afflicted and wildly listing centre of her brain made it difficult to differentiate the important and the trivial.

Her subconscious, nauseas as it was, tapped its bony knuckles on the little black door.

She stopped, this time to listen, and then stopped listening, this time to marvel.

Her relationship with her own innermost thoughts, memories and feelings had always been tenuous at best; speaking more realistically, borderline hostile. She'd never considered herself fond of the part of her brain that provided unwanted advocacy for the other side of an offense. It wanted to force her to admit what she didn't want to admit. All of her memories, bar none- euphoric or erotic- were irrevocably rooted in a hard, dry-soiled world composed of painful events, pulled together by the gravity of a singular, insatiable volcanic core.

None of that had changed. She knew inherently that there was very little chance that it ever would.

After so many years, that knowing just illuminated the long-standing ache of regret that was still languishing in doorframe of that shabby, half-lit room in her mind. Even as it casually picked the black rot of paranoia out of the carpeting, it's tense, pained eyes were always drawn to stare at that door, gazing through it at the last patch of pure shadow cast behind it.

She fought to keep that dark; no matter consequences of shuttering it away, she was afraid that releasing the grounding inferno of the core would burn what tentative life she'd eked out of herself to ashes.

She knew too intimately the sensation of frigid implosion that would follow. She'd tiptoed along its cutting edge far too many times.

She and her subconscious had a reluctant understanding that had everything to do with the thick and roping scars those times had left behind.

But this-

This was a sensation.

Where she fought to secure her mind's old photographs and rationalizing intuitions in permanent restraints, her relationship with her emotions had never been so clear.

Like old friends who frequent the same tiny bar but always narrowly miss meeting, she knew only what the bartender gave her; an ever-growing collection of unclear and scribbled notes. The extent of her interactions with feeling were dealt with almost entirely through the physical medium of her body, and all it handed her was relentless burning and shivering, glancing pain and gasping flushes.

She didn't understand any of it. There were so many things it could _mean_.

But this… was a new sensation.

She already felt scalded by the glancing heat of the inferno in the corner shadow; there was mocking heat burning under her skin.

Under the underside of her burning skin, somewhere behind her clavicles, drawing a slow, warm line through her insides, up the wrong side of her spine, was tentative expectation. She _wanted_ something. The _want_ was there, waiting with an open hand.

She felt her face wrinkle in confusion.

It wasn't hunger. There was no sudden ache to gently remind her; this was something unfamiliar, a crumpled letter in an unknown language.

She forced herself to keep moving, shoving down anything she could think of needing into a suitcase that was still barely half-full.

It had never occurred to her how little she really owned. She paused to look at the stiff-boned carapace of her belongings.

The unfamiliar expectation sent another warm finger up her spine, cresting gently around her ribs and down her stomach. She shivered and looked down at her body in puzzled desperation. "But what do you _want?_"

The buzz of locusts outside had heightened to a fever. Jennifer jerked, listening. There were words to the parasites' song.

His voice cut through the rapid-fire twittering like the low growl of a tiger in an aviary.

She had no idea what he'd said, but another warm shiver, more demanding and more pronounced, set the hairs on her arms on end. She looked at them in increasingly frustrated confusion. "_Brysiwch ac yn dweud wrthyf beth yr wyf eisiau. _I don't have time for this," she hissed roughly.

Heavy knuckles on the door, and another low growl of reproach. She closed her suitcase with a careless slam, hauling herself up to her feet. Another heavy knock, markedly more impatient.

"_Jennifer,"_ it called.

It was either her burning skin or the warm fingers of anticipation; something was making her light-headed.

_"Oui, Monsieur Kaiba?"_ she called out, feeling feverishly whimsical. _"Vous devriez vous méfier de cette vermine, ou ils vont manger les deux d'entre nous."_

He chuckled a little at that. The low heat of his laughter met the shiver tracing her ribs and sent her diaphragm vibrating like a tuning fork. She sent her body another puzzled glance downwards.

_"Ne vous inquiétez pas à leur sujet. Il suffit d'ouvrir la porte."_

She giggled at his low, melodic French and then wondered why she'd never bothered to find out why he spoke it at all; it wasn't exactly a business language.

Strangely, she'd just assumed that it was natural. Being something of a polymath and a polyglot herself, she just hadn't questioned it. She pushed the pads of her fingers along the rough canvas exterior of her suitcase, puzzlement tempered with an inward locus of fascination. _"Si j'ouvre la porte pour vous,"_ she lilted, treading the narrow edge of flirtation,_ "voulez-vous m'aider cacher, vieux tigre?"_

The buzzing had faded to a sensually low, breathlessly inquisitive hum. She could hear him speaking in Japanese to someone, too quietly; barely above the hum itself.

He sounded impatient.

_"Evidemment je vais vous aider à cacher. Pourquoi pensez-vous que je suis ici?"_

Jennifer couldn't suppress a giggle. _"Si nous parlons franchement, c'est un étrange renversement des circonstances,"_ she told him honestly, and heard him chuckle almost inaudibly in response. _"J'ai passé tellement de temps loin de vous cacher que j'hésite à se cacher __**avec**__ vous."_

He'd quieted.

_"Vous supposent à tort que vous avez le choix. Ouvrez la porte."_

She couldn't stop her eyebrows from shooting up incredulously. "You couldn't be more charming, _vieux tigre_," she said drily, fumbling the locks with sweating hands. "_Cette chevalerie indéfectible!_ Sir, I am fairly_ aswoon_."

Tight-lipped and visibly tense, he stood head and shoulders above the majority of the small of crowd that had filled the hallway. She noted with amusement that despite their obvious tenacity, most of the people around him were avoiding standing too near.

"I think they're frightened of you," she told him insightfully. He just quirked an eyebrow at her and motioned for her to hurry.

The air was charged with a somehow singular heterogeneous emotion: eager apprehension. Like a dog performing a trick expects a reward, the human locusts in the hallway were mincing back and forth in anxious expectation, all of them _want_ing, none of them willing to risk… _something_.

It wasn't that she wasn't sure what it was that they were afraid of. They were afraid of Kaiba. Their eyes danced from her to him and back in a universal rhythmic motion; anxious, eager, expectant.

The reason _why_ was unclear to her.

As she'd pointed it out, she'd realized that it was true; they were afraid of him. Even the previously audacious woman who'd cornered her in the morning- now sweating profusely after hours in the hallway- looked nervous.

_'Why?'_

She'd never found him particularly frightening.

Pushy and overly physical, yes. But she'd never entertained more than a few moments of worry about him actually _hurting_ her.

She had a moment of paranoia when it occurred to her that maybe it _wasn't_ him that they were afraid of.

That paranoia gave way to a realization that grounded her firmly back into coherence.

In a way, it _was_ her that they were afraid of.

They were afraid of the unpunished murderer of Gozaburo Kaiba.

He knew she'd done it.

Of course, she knew she'd done it.

But they-

They didn't know.

A world's gravity of guilt pulled down even the pleasantly unreadable feeling that had beset her stomach and spine.

As the elevator doors slid shut behind them, blocking out the green wallpaper, the yellow tract lighting and the faces of the country's most vocal- and most misinformed- jury, she had to fight to keep her own expression from crumpling miserably inwards.

She couldn't meet his eyes. He didn't say anything about it, and she was grateful for that.

'_If nothing has changed…'_

She couldn't ask it, either; the words _'Why on earth do you still want me?'_ burned her tongue, but they'd provoke questions of their own.

Whether it was leaden guilt or the scorching need to know-

To avoid the illumination of those probing questions, the pain was worth it.

Her skin was still burning. The well-buried inferno that made up her world was still mocking her.

She couldn't suppress the push of an unhappy little frown. She saw him look over in her peripheral vision.

Jennifer turned her face away purposefully.

There was ice chilling in her intestines, and she fought it with dogged force.

_'I won't let you make me implode.'_

_(No Evidence Available)_

_End Note: Cyfieithiadau am chi! Traductions pour vous! Translations for you!_

"_Brysiwch ac yn dweud wrthyf beth yr wyf eisiau." = "_Hurry up and tell me what I want."

"_Oui, Monsieur Kaiba? Vous devriez vous méfier de cette vermine, ou ils vont manger les deux d'entre nous." = _"Yes, Mister Kaiba? You should be wary of these vermin, or they'll eat the both of us."

"_Ne vous inquiétez pas à leur sujet. Il suffit d'ouvrir la porte." = _"Don't worry about them. Just open the door."

"_Si j'ouvre la porte pour vous, voulez-vous m'aider cacher, vieux tigre?" = _"If I open the door for you, will you help me hide, old tiger?"

"_Evidemment je vais vous aider à cacher. Pourquoi pensez-vous que je suis ici?" = _"Of course/Obviously I'll help you hide. Why do you think I'm here?"

"_Si nous parlons franchement, c'est un étrange renversement des circonstances."_ "If we speak frankly, this is a strange reversal of circumstances."

"_J'ai passé tellement de temps loin de vous cacher que j'hésite à se cacher __**avec**__ vous." =_ "I spent so much time hiding from you that I hesitate to go into hiding **with** you."

"_Vous supposent à tort que vous avez le choix. Ouvrez la porte." = _"You incorrectly assume that you have a choice. Open the door."

"_Cette chevalerie indéfectible!" _= "This unfailing chivalry!"


	12. Chapter 12

_**Note:**__ H'okay, too much to say, obviously we need point format. Here we go!_

_**WandererRaen**__: I like allusions. You like allusions. OH YEAH. Hot allusions baby, HNGH._

_**HieiHeeroRikuSesshoumaruSeto**__: What up. I be here to improve/waste your day once more._

_HELHEIM SAYS: __**DID YOU MISS ME? BITCH AIN'T WRIT ME SINCE CHAPTER SIX!**_

_Go read: __**Tainted Apple**__'s__** Siren**__. DO IT NOW AND TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK. DO IT, WENCHES._

_Million-Years-After-Starting-This-Chapter: I just got fucked in the ass by four essays, a take-home exam, thirty hours of work a week, exam preparation, and the unnecessary requirement of sleep. If I didn't have to sleep, my life would be beautiful.__Maybe Jennifer is wish fulfilment. _

_Haha. Not. This poor fucking girl._

_**Reshmee**__: __**Body **__and soul, eh? EH? EH? (LAWL CANADA… EH.) What kind of bodily devotion? (Hint: Jokes about masturbation. One of us is a big creep for sure.) My fanfiction writing: hazardous to MY studying, too. _

_Rawrgh! Let's all flunk together on this train-ride to hell!_

_**Hey, Listen!**__ Hemolymph is what bugs have instead of blood. Ichor is a poisonous blood/part of the blood first attributed to injured Greek gods, but later used by H.P. Lovecraft for his eldritch monstrosities. Useless facts of the day!_

_Final Edit: HRNGH. I'm an academic badass! Psycho-sociological essay on Thomas Hobbes and the reality of evil in human nature? Written in five hours. BECAUSE FUCK YEAH, THOMAS HOBBES! (My love is unconditional.)_

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ UNF! That is the sound of my pelvic thrust. (Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Twelve_

He was treading the brink of self-inflicted insanity.

No matter how many times he went over the facts, they only added up to one conclusion.

It wasn't a conclusion that he liked, but sorted and filed, the facts only had one visible common denominator.

He'd left her at home with an overeager Mokuba, trusting that even if his little brother's affection was romantic in nature, her propensity to brutally deny anything unfamiliar would prevail.

She'd been surprisingly compliant when he'd proposed that she once again stay with them, despite avoiding discussion on almost every subject that related to their previous relationship. She'd even consented to begin doing the bulk of her newer modelling work at home- his home- to avoid unnecessary media exposure.

Jennifer wasn't playing _good wife_, but there was something wrong, and he knew it. She was hiding something from him.

What concerned him was that he suspected that it had to do with their yet unsolved mystery of the missing employees.

The facts on their own seemed only loosely related, the few dangling threads left behind by a truly masterful plan; either so cunning that the effects were yet unnoticeable to the uninformed, or- the more likely case- as of the moment, still unimplemented.

On their own, the facts were four missing employees, a series of long-lost security tapes, and a statement from Nakamura's bank informing his wife that upwards of half of a million American dollars had been deposited in her husband's new account by an unidentified benefactor.

Everything about the first and the last reeked of money laundering.

But then: the _tapes_. The importance of the security tapes threw that theory headlong out of the window- pun intended. Minoru Ueda had only been with the company for two years; for the tapes to have been in his possession, he would have had to receive them from someone else- someone outside of the company. After the incident, Kaiba Corporation's security branch had been scoured unrelentingly, ventilation and personal effects included. For him to have received security tapes from an outside source was alarming, but not terribly significant on its own; it was the content that made the act so individual and deliberate.

The content meant that whatever the plan was, it was somehow related to his foster father.

That was frightening and inscrutable, but hunting down and interrogating Gozaburo's old business partners wasn't impossible. Given that the likeliest motive was the expected boost in company value following the expansion's release- the sudden rise in share value oddly akin to the tempting flesh of a bright and overgrown apple, too stubborn to fall from the money tree- they fit very nicely into the range of probable suspects. Under those circumstances, the tapes could easily be a red herring, tossed out to distract him.

He could even accept that someone had held them for seven years for just that purpose. People went to great lengths for money; particularly, large amounts of it.

Jennifer's involvement changed everything.

Her presence fundamentally altered the dynamic, tossing the facts up from a hand, out of the pitfall depths of his reasonable conclusions, for the sole purpose of having them clatter down on the table like the soothsaying tokens of a Louisiana voodoo queen. She brought with her an entirely different interpretation, carrying with it all the menace and superstition of the ritual that it mimicked; responding to her power, those few cracked remnants formed a circle of bones with a bloody and inquisitive hole for a heart.

Nakamura, the recipient of a rather large payout _and_ the imbecile who'd left the development lab unlocked overnight for currently inscrutable reasons, was- of course- her husband.

The footage on the security tapes was priceless regardless of timing, but the tapes had only reappeared after Jennifer herself had; and a seventeen-year old she was the subject of the tapes, each segment detailing a brief fragment of her wandering climb through his building.

The missing employees in question had disappeared the day after the celebratory dinner- as far as he knew, her first exposure to other Kaiba Corporation employees, including Hamada and Fujimoto.

Ueda had been there as well, one of a handful of the security team who had accompanied them.

The missing heartbeat of her involvement asked _'Why now?'_ and answered itself with _'Jennifer's here.'_

And from that, he came back to the same unwanted conclusion.

She had something to do with it. He was unsure if she realized her own involvement; he wanted to believe that she didn't, but didn't have the benefit of his brother's naivety.

Her strangely submissive behaviour was making him suspect that she did. It could be easily dismissed as a reaction to a multitude of sudden changes, but he knew her too well. She didn't roll with the punches- she kicked and screamed and fought for her routine.

She wasn't screaming or kicking, just waiting quietly and patiently. If she wasn't fighting against so much change, then he couldn't be sure that she hadn't expected it- and that brought him back, again, to the unwelcome period at the end of the sentence.

Animal sacrifices and shamanic tools aside, the corpse of a mystery was stinking up his office building, and she had something to do with it.

There was a small chance it was all just wildly circumstantial, but he had very little faith in that.

There was an even smaller, tiny, _infinitesimal _chance that she'd taken him at his word when he'd said nothing had changed, and she was calm simply because she trusted that it was true.

He did his best to ignore that particularly stunning piece of provocative foolishness as it flirted out at him from the between the narrow blinds of the chamber that he'd retired his emotions to. That chance- that _non-chance_, he corrected- was a bloodless apparition, both as suspicious and as tempting as a beckoning will o' wisp, but twice as likely to abandon him halfway through the marsh, alone amongst conversational Louisiana alligators.

Knowing that hurt something fundamental between his lungs, and that, in turn, made him uncomfortable. It was too vulnerable a state.

He knew that he couldn't allow their history to misdirect him. Whether it was haunted bones or bone china, drug prophecies, convulsive proclamations or mesmerizing and outlandish convictions, attending too closely would let her twist him away from the rational truth that he'd come so close to grasping.

It didn't matter that it wasn't a truth that he was overly eager to grasp.

His conclusions, lucid and realistic, pointed unforgiving fingers towards her and told him that were he to turn away, trusting her with his exposed back, there was above an eighty percent chance that she'd take the opportunity to shove her bony hands between his ribs and generously ventilate his heart and lungs with those jagged fingernails.

Those were not good odds.

Those odds brought him back to the same unwanted conclusions.

Those odds meant that it was possible that he'd finally found the real reason that, of all people, it was Nakamura that she'd married.

Those odds meant that it was possible that he'd finally found the real reason that, of all times, it was now that she'd finally come back, and from that, the real reason why she'd left in the first place.

Those odds knew that her warped emotional state caused her to react instinctively in any unanticipated circumstance, and that those same impulsive reactions hindered her ability to make rational decisions in the aftermath.

Those odds asserted that he could reasonably assume that she was as tight-fisted with her grudges- both rational and reactive - as she was with her belongings.

The odds implied that she wasn't just involved; she was an active, if not _the _active, conspirator.

He groaned, resting his aching skull in his hands.

If he were to accept the worst possibility as truth, he had an entirely different and entirely more difficult problem to solve:

_'How can I still have her?'_

He recognized the absurdity of it.

Under the circumstances, it was an incredibly stupid desire.

But a mixture of deep, stubborn possessiveness and total unwillingness to have wasted four years of lockjaw patience made him balk at the concept of striking and then simply letting go.

She'd once talked, vaguely and dismissively, about the difficulty that she faced in controlling her more insistent physical desires, however inexplicable they were. It was the great and glamourous token of an addictive personality, and she'd known that; but she'd called it _want_ing, denoting the word with a strange sort of intense individuality, different from her so-illustrious _jonesing._ She'd _jonesed _for her pills, shaking, sweating and moaning, sleepless and consequently unable to escape the worst of the withdrawal. She had _wanted_ him, creeping into his room in the last hour of the last night, always the curious junkie, just too fascinated to leave without knowing; even when she'd already known that latter was always the predecessor of the first. He hadn't bothered commenting on her rambling exposition. She tended towards the healthy assumption that others did not share her neurotic character.

He doubted that she would react well to discovering that it was not a personality trait limited only to her.

He had no doubt that she inevitably would.

He'd _wanted_ the final strike against his foster father with a desperation that he'd never experienced before then; not even in the dragging hours when he'd worried that Gozaburo would simply lock him in the study and leave him to starve, chained to that scarred oak writing desk; not even when he'd acted out, spitting vitriol to redirect his faux father's sadism away from his brother, even knowing that he'd take Mokuba's blows twofold for it.

When Gozaburo had been killed, he'd lapsed into almost an almost suicidal state, obsessed with the sleepless, dead-end pursuit.

Someone had _stolen_ his triumph. They had taken it from him and disappeared, leaving nothing, no corporeal trace to shift his obsession to. Unfulfilled, the _want _had never faded, but when his momentum had finally slowed, thwarted by inconclusive lead after inconclusive lead, he'd buried it, discontented but resigned. From that uneasy and unstill grave had risen a curiously morbid sentiment.

He felt almost as though he owed her a debt of gratitude. Managing the affairs of a multimillion dollar company from the confines of a courtroom holding cell seemed like it would have been a tricky proposition.

He wondered, for the first time, not what _she_ would have done if she'd known his relation to Gozaburo when they'd met, but what _he _would have, had he known exactly who she was.

He was startled and fascinated to find that his mind provided him with no answers to that bemusing query, not even theoretical ones. If she'd announced it to him in the middle of that dusty classroom, produced proof, even threatened him; how would _he_ have reacted?

He didn't know. Bizarrely, he was suffering from a massive failure of imagination.

He realized why.

Though he'd accepted it logically and rationally as true, he was still having trouble reconciling his idea of '_Jennifer'_ with his idea of '_Gozaburo's murderer'_. The two had formed irretrievably individual presences in his mind.

When she'd created an indelible mark on his mind, owing to entirely her own tenacious merit, she'd made it impossible for him to identify her as anything other than Jennifer.

_The_ Jennifer.

_His_ Jennifer.

And when she had suddenly abandoned him, he'd struggled against the same intense desire to _know_. It had been almost physically painful to force himself to do nothing, but the facts at the time had remained: Pursuing her would be unhealthy, push the limits of legality, and reinforce the mindset of a Mokuba already exhibiting the same worrying symptoms of fixation.

And, fuck it, he was older. He knew better. He'd been through that meat-grinder routine before, and he'd learned what came of it:

Nothing.

So he'd waited and endured.

Finally done waiting and enduring on one major truth- the connection between Jennifer, Mokuba, and their foster father- he'd almost been glad to discover the missed link of connection between the first two. It gave his brother a more reasonable foundation for the strength of his feelings towards her; a sort of long-standing monomaniacal saviour fixation was unhealthy, but a completely unfounded obsession was much worse.

He kept putting off discussing it with him, too aware that his reproach would be painfully hypocritical.

Besides, Jennifer still made an effort to be tedious and dismissive when confronted with Mokuba's attention; he hoped that would help ease the emotional tunnel vision his sibling had developed.

Unfortunately, her lack of awareness of the scope of the situation meant that where his brother was improving,_ he_ was getting worse.

He was brutally aware of it, but the fact of the matter was that it had simply gone too far. He didn't want to let go.

Discovering what she'd done, who she was, had initiated in his mind a determined but increasingly chaotic attempt to fuse one deeply buried fixation with another, and the screaming noise and mounting pressure of that combination made it impossible to cover or ignore.

He _wanted_ her.

Irrepressibly.

But, unlike her, he wasn't consumed by the immediate compulsion to act. He was, by nature, an opportunist. He was biding his time. Waiting.

He didn't enjoy doing it, but he'd become very, very good at it. It was an indispensible business skill.

He'd begun to wait just days after meeting her. He'd been engaging in white-knuckled, jaw-snapping arguments almost daily, watching closely, waiting for a chance to cripple her. She still thought the derailment had occurred when they'd been handed the assignment; for him, the train had been tearing furrows through the earth long before then.

For him, it had started when he'd realized that she was smarter than him.

Like being ousted as a champion by a naïve and delusional runt, having his intellect lampooned by some gaunt and pasty exchange student- someone of even less consequence than the unfailingly childish Yuugi Motou- had torn bloody trenches in his pride.

She had more raw cognitive horsepower than him; she simply thought faster, calculated and inferred more naturally, and there was nothing that could be done about that.

So he'd been waiting for the chance to break her, comforted by the notion that even if he couldn't challenge her on the grounds of pure intellect, he could sink her with dogged patience and watchful determination.

He'd been waiting for months before the assignment. When the teacher had thrown it out in a flurry of hysteria, he'd fought it without thinking, only to stomp on reverse, suddenly aware that it was an opportunity the likes of which he would never see again.

Her contentious pride hadn't allowed her to refuse.

It was only after that he had realized the potential effect being bound to her for two weeks could have on his business; that concern had turned out to be nothing but a fleeting worry, but he'd nevertheless approached the whole business with an attitude of impending violence.

But then he'd discovered something.

Jennifer Nauswell had had a dirty little bottle of secrets stashed in the cold metal tubing under her kitchen sink.

All he'd been able to do was marvel.

If it had been amphetamines, methylphenidates- any kind of stimulant at all- he would have accepted her rapid-fire mind as simply a byproduct of chemical enhancement.

The sleeping pills were another matter altogether. Depressants were notorious for slowing cognitive function, especially when abused. She should've been groggy. Her comprehension should have been impaired.

She should have been slow.

All he'd been able to do was marvel, because at that moment, he'd realized _why_ she was smarter than him.

He was, by no stretch of the imagination, stupid.

The simple fact was that she didn't fit into the average schema, and at that moment, he'd understood it; the unconscious twitches, the geometric apartment layout, the perpetual social improprieties, the conflicting fascination with and fear of being touched.

Her heavyweight brain had overbalanced the delicate scale that dictated function between mind and body, and she'd tried to correct it with drugs.

Choosing to withhold them from her had been an act that he had been aware was somewhat cruel. She'd suffered for it. It had played with her gauzelike sense of reality, sending her drifting in and out of reach with the inscrutable tide.

But, in the end, she'd still beat him. He'd become aware of something fundamentally distressing. She was just too stubborn to break, even when indulging in what were debatably either insane flights of fancy or actual hallucinations.

Her inflexible pride would break in one context, and one alone: Death.

And he hadn't wanted that. He hadn't been lying when he'd told her that he'd never hated her. Her existence had wounded his ego, and he'd wanted to correct that. That had been his sole compulsion.

At that point, he'd already developed an almost morbid fondness for her. She was interesting. All claws and teeth and hissing remarks, like some horror dredged up from the bottom of the ocean.

He'd always liked strange, potentially dangerous things; it was the sheer awesome absurdity contained in the prospect of a wildly oversized, literally incendiary, and inexplicably winged reptile that had formed his not inconsiderable- and admittedly, shamefully serious- love of dragons. Jennifer, occasionally inhuman, violent, unkempt and primeval, but possessing of a bizarre brand of sublime brilliance, fit very neatly into that same category of the inspirationally bizarre.

But in not being able to break her, and in not wanting to hurt her, he'd reached an impasse.

And then the age old question had been:

_'What is option B?'_

The solution had been simple.

Make her his. Possess her.

Even if she was smarter than him, even if her acid remarks cut him to the quick, if she belonged to him, the conflict was null.

If she was his, he couldn't be offended by her being the more intelligent one; she was his. Her intelligence could not conflict with his own; it, like her, was his.

So he'd gone about procuring her in a purely pragmatic sense, meeting her on her own insomniac battleground, where she couldn't question the fairness of the competition, and doing what he did best:

_Waiting_.

And, as expected, he'd won.

Along the way, he'd discovered a number of unexpectedly pleasant things.

When she wasn't trying to eviscerate or emasculate him, she was quite funny, and something of an odd but lively conversationalist.

She had very simple, practical taste, and was extremely easy to please; one of maybe a dozen people in the breadth of his world that would react with hilariously bombastic ecstasy at receiving something as arbitrary as a frying pan or an unexpected toaster.

Her crippling fear of being touched meant that she'd maintained an almost childlike hypersensitivity, responding immediately and visibly to the slightest coercion. When she'd finally overcome that aversion, she'd proved herself to be an incredibly sexual creature.

When she wasn't using her vocal cords for multilingual curses or paranoid accusations, she made some truly spectacular noises.

Though, admittedly, those noises were generally interspersed with curses anyway.

In the context, he didn't really mind.

She had an almost equal capacity for provoking him to oaths; usually when he failed to realize how long her nails were getting.

He recognized that he had drifted into very dangerous, provocative territory, but couldn't be bothered to steer himself out of it, because the facts remained, and the final statement was as follows:

If she was conspiring against him, then he was working on a time limit; waiting would no longer provide him the advantage.

Unfortunately, strong-arming her was pointless. Even if he succeeded, she'd hate him for it.

But he couldn't afford to trust her.

Those same odds: bringing him back to the same futile question as before, answering to the same inconclusive conclusions, dictated by the same puzzling facts.

He sighed, leaning heavily on his elbows. He felt in his temples the intimate drumbeat of too many inconclusive speculations, demanding to be freed.

The familiar promise of the _Yggdrasill_ immersion pod in the corner of his office was tempting him, but he hadn't immersed in days; he had no way of even knowing if _AppSpo_ would be online. The little American usually _was_, but he still couldn't know unless he loaded in- or broke some rather serious privacy laws.

He had abandoned him in a rather sticky situation the last time he'd loaded out, though. He wondered if _AppSpo_ had gotten out safely.

And, if he hadn't, if he was still angry about it.

He felt the corner of his mouth tug upwards, despite everything.

_AppSpo_'s anger had all the constancy of a flash flood; he sulked and glowered and pouted, but his ill moods only lasted until the next awe-inspiring landscape or fascinating brightly coloured object they encountered.

His eyes drifted back to it.

It was really not the best use of his time, considering the situation that he was in.

It had a positive effect on his ever-more-strained sanity, he argued. It was a valid, effective method of stress-relief. That was why he'd developed it.

And he needed to depressurize.

Badly.

_(No Evidence Available)_

_Helheim_ had seen a huge increase in players since the update.

Considering where he'd loaded in, he couldn't really see the effects. Valid once more, a long-forgotten concern resurfaced. He frowned, furrowing his eyebrows.

He'd loaded _out_ from the ant den; he'd loaded _in_ in the ant den.

Around him, a few besmeared but still gaudy pieces of _AppSpo_'s colourful insectoids were littering a ground blackened by the soak of dark ichor. The walls were smeared with sticky swathes of it; some of the higher-set holes around him had developed sticky black tongues of hemolymph. Thankfully, the monsters themselves, in wholeness and life, were nowhere to be seen.

He hoped that meant that_ AppSpo_ had been successful in his venture.

That concern, though relevant, could wait. A more imminent problem prioritized itself.

The few tunnels both wide enough to accommodate him _and_ not clogged with ichor proved very steep.

His characterform wasn't exactly light and flexible.

Climbing a steep, smooth slope just wasn't a possibility. He'd had enough difficulty with the coastal breakwater; if he hadn't had the benefit of being so generously vomited over it on the return trip, he was sure that the inwards pull of the wet sand and the difficulty his gauntlets posed in grasping the slippery rocks would have left him helpless.

Here, there was no wet rock, and no damp sand, but the dry and dusty nature of the clean tunnels meant that his palms and fingertips slid freely along them, devoid of grip.

_'How the hell am I going to get out of here?'_

The answer was fairly simple: Awkwardly and with an embarrassing amount of effort.

And through a tunnel both less steep and less clean.

He failed more than once. As expected, even one of the less challenging tunnels was a difficult proposition. He was all at once very glad that no one was around to witness his struggles and extremely irked that he couldn't simply seek assistance.

Caught halfway up, jammed in an ichor-sticky sudden narrowing of the passage, he wondered for a split-second why the programmers would have created such a patently ridiculous deathtrap. Immediately thereafter, he realized that most of the player characterforms were much more suited to the environmental hazards than his. This was solely his problem.

Or Tokigawa's, if he felt like blaming someone.

On the fifth try, sheer effort was just enough.

The plates of his armour were stiff, sticking together as his seeping coat of dark goo seeped between them. When he tried to move, the joint would grind and pull before suddenly releasing with a sickening pop.

As a result, didn't feel particularly elated at his escape. Instead, he hauled himself to his feet and tried futilely to work the fluid free, biting back curses.

The entrance to the ant den was much the same as he'd left it; dry, grey and sterile, with one exception; there was a thick black swath of hemolymph leading from his hole to the entrance.

_Pop_. _Pop-pop._

_Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Pop._

A small groan of revulsion as the joints in his hand let loose a multitude of popping-gum _cracks _when he tried to spread and straighten his fingers.

Another sound joined his physical symphony, lending him a helpful metronome.

Rapid tapping to his left.

_Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap._

He turned to look.

_AppSpo,_ cross-armed, cross-legged, tap-footed, looked particularly unimpressed.

_"Not fun, is it?"_ The American asked. He both looked and sounded somewhat petulant. Kaiba just looked at his much lighter, leaner frame in disbelief, accompanied closely by budding resent. When he went to speak, _AppSpo_ cut him off. _"You,"_ he started, and then stopped, shifting, before starting again.

_"__**You**__ threw me into the Ant Queen."_

_'Ah,'_ Kaiba thought.

The scrawny little moderator was sulking.

_"I had to go,"_ the brunet told him. _AppSpo_ looked unappeased.

_"You __**threw **__**me**__ into the __**Ant Queen**__," _he enunciated, slicing his hands forward stiffly, for all the world like he was practicing miniaturized and effeminate karate.

Kaiba just looked at him, unsure of what to say. He lifted a shoulder in puzzlement, and then winced when it freed with a particularly loud and unappealing _snap_. _"It… was not intentional."_

It wasn't an apology. It came out sounding almost like a question.

There was a moment of tense, confused silence asthe American rose and approached him.

_AppSpo _started digging between the plates with his thin fingers, chastising him when he moved- the shifting armour pinched his fingers, but the stickiness made it difficult to pull them free quickly enough- and complaining about how long it had been since they had had an adventure.

Kaiba was bemused, but comprehended that the conflict was abruptly over.

His focus returned, again, to his more imminent problem.

'_How the fuck am I going to get this shit off?'_

_(No Evidence Available)_

They hadn't been to the city of _Hel_ in a surprisingly long time. His toughness and _AppSpo_'s dexterity meant that they generally did alright on their own.

However, due to the sudden strain on the system, he felt compelled to make sure that nothing had affected the environmental fluidity, causing prompt conflicts or somehow corrupting any of his fastidious programming. It was strictly, pragmatically, work that needed to done.

Of course, he was also eying the lower districts, just casually, for the previously missed presence of a smithy.

Someone with experience cleaning metal.

Just casually.

It wasn't important.

For once focusing on his surroundings, instead of seeking the tell-tale symptoms of a glitch, he realized how much he'd missed the city; it was a fascinating place. It had to be. As the epicentre of _Helheim_, it was naturally required to hold the attention of thousands.

From the outside, it was a monstrous parody of _the city upon the hill._ Inside, it was sheer claustrophobic horror.

The buildings, all the same damp-looking, sickly yellow limestone, leaned menacingly inwards, making the view of the sky from the street just a hairsbreadth of uneasy grey. They manifested in two forms: tall, uncomfortably thin, crowded closely together like so many unbrushed and yellowing teeth, divided by narrow and menacing alleys; squat, fat and toadlike, their empty, unevenly set windows the city's watchful eyes, lashed by the mouldering wood of the windowsills.

The streets themselves were narrow, steep, and perpetually coated with the barest layer of almost imperceptible wet slime- until it coated an unwary player from the knees down, chilling even the bravest of bones.

Shops were lit with torches guttering in the damp. At night, the few lights on the streets were lanterns, hung out in front of unwelcoming inns. Doorways were low; stairs, uneven.

Just enough of a difference in size to catch a misplaced step and send an unfortunate soul face-long into a distasteful dew-like settling of grime- or worse: the cold stone edge of the next misplaced step.

The NPCs were quiet, spoke in sharp, quick, almost creaking bursts- too like the settling of the damp foundations of the shops themselves- and watched with pale, moist, protuberant eyes set too low over wide, frog-like mouths.

The shadows teemed with things that could have been rats, but left behind their own tokens when affronted; long, coiling yellow-grey tails, the bases thickly furred with coarse black bristles.

_Hel_ watched from above, unseen in her squatting sprawl of mouldering halls.

_AppSpo_ was strangely unaffected by all of it.

He supposed it was natural, considering that the American had _chosen_ that specific hub for his spawn point, but his flamboyant, womanish behaviour had an unexpected effect: arousing in him the constant expectation of a missish swoon. Whether it was leeches, ants or horror-infested cities, Kaiba simply could not bring himself to comprehend that the scrawny moderator had some properly masculine tendencies- albeit a very narrow spectrum of them.

Since that was the case, _AppSpo_ was unconcerned by their surroundings and had taken to running full-tilt around the city, rapturous with interest.

Unfortunately, his high speeds and lack of control meant that, no swooning required, his very own _Wandering Knight_ was on occasion required to save him from the inevitable peril of gravity.

Bizarrely, the young millionaire's uncomfortable state had lent him an edge against the floating damp; where others slid, he was lent stability by a marriage of his broad-set, considerable weight and the thick layer of grit that had adhered to the ichor on his legs and feet during the walk. For once, _AppSpo_'s normal perch of choice was the most appropriate it had ever been- he was never averse to clamouring safely up on the_ Knight_'s broad shoulders, causing a riotous din with his flat feet and bony hands- but the promise of stability seemed to hold no allure.

These days, Kaiba usually had a piercing headache; he doubted the American's scrambling could worsen it noticeably. Amidst the confusion and isolation of his real life, the weight and intimacy of feeling someone near, even if they were actually half a world away, held a strange comfort.

He wasn't above admitting that he almost missed it. Almost.

The tell-tale beginning of a shuffling slip nearby. Down went _AppSpo_ again, sliding on the damp cobblestones with a tiny shriek, body listing over like a cyclist taking a hard turn.

The young brunet grabbed him, hoisting him back to his feet.

Truly, the sheer amount of time he devoted- on a regular basis- solely to stopping skinny drama queens from harming themselves- _or others_- amazed him.

_AppSpo_ shot him a sheepish grin. _"Sorry, sir." _A contemplative pause._ "…Again."_

He just looked at him, at once exasperated and unimpressed.

If Jennifer made him feel like a pet owner, _AppSpo_ made him feel like he was training for fatherhood. He briefly considered the comparison. _'I suppose it's not all that different.' _

_She_ came to mind again, and his uneasy mood worsened.

Before he could once more begin to dwell on the unsolvable problem of his real life, his virtual one called him to attention, hailing in the form of a near-death experience; one that culminated in his catching the skinny American's bony head half an inch from the sharp projection of a broken window.

He had discovered in _AppSpo_ a knack far greater than his sometimes unnerving intuition; like the good-tempered but unruly child he brought to mind, he was in need of constant supervision. Whatever the situation, whether the adversary was player character or NPC, his optimistic inattention frequently set him tiptoeing along the edge of danger.

Like the swooning princess, he needed protecting, but in not possessing a regal or retiring disposition, he became the princess most difficult to keep safe.

Escaping into his thoughts, brooding or otherwise, became impossible. A minute's inattention required an hour's correction.

The American made a sudden noise of excitement, and he looked up, apprehensive.

In a world with real potential danger, his immediate reaction would have been an incontestable _no_. The storefront of the blacksmith's forge gave an undeniable impression of the building within being inhabited by someone with psychopathic intent.

The smithy's sign, made of some unusually well-cured wood, hung proudly above the door. The image of the hammer and anvil was skilfully carved in deep relief, worn flatter with age and wear, but still clearly discernible; the fanciful lettering was painted and bordered in what had doubtless once been a vivid red and resounding black. This ostentatious combination, once meant to attract the eye and assure the customer of the smith's skill and ensuing prosperity, had faded with neglect, mutating the advertisement into a grotesque and eminently uninviting parody of itself.

The anvil, now worn to roundness, no longer looked like an anvil. Only the bottom left projection of the anvil's base had survived in all its clarity.

The impression the sign gave was of a hammer falling on the back of a head.

Even the undauntable _AppSpo_ seemed a little daunted.

Nevertheless, they entered, wincing as they pushed the door inward; it swung with both a heavy groan and a high scream. Kaiba didn't think the hinges had been oiled. Ever.

The heat was stifling.

Literally so; the little American was actually having trouble breathing. The air was heavy and opaque with smoke and steam.

Mercifully, though unexpectedly, he could feel the wet heat working loose his joints. The smithy's thick steam was dissolving his drying coat of ichor. _Plip. Plop. _

He looked down, discovering that he'd begun to trail pin-point droplets of black along the floor when he moved.

_AppSpo_ was flagging, both unable to see and struggling to breathe. With a grunt, he hoisted him up into the crook of an arm. This time, having the American perch on his shoulders wasn't practical; steam rose. It would be thicker near the ceiling, only exacerbating the problem.

As they pushed cautiously through the steam, travelling along what seemed like miles of unfinished wood flooring, a figure formed in against the whiteness.

What he'd expected; being a blacksmith had certain physical requirements that needed fulfilling. Wide, brawny shoulders and arms, to sustain the hammer's expectant lift and climactic fall. Powerful legs and torso, for lifting ore, carrying armour, moving the anvil. Heavy, leathered skin under a soot-blackened apron, burnt and thickened by jetting sparks from the furnace and the grinding wheel.

The near-flat nose of an old boxer. The heavy brow of a thug. The wide lipless mouth, surrounded by the trench-like furrows of a perpetual frown.

It just looked at them, hammer still in hand.

_AppSpo_ spoke before he could.

_"I'd like to have my armour cleaned, please," _he squeaked.

Kaiba looked at his companion in unprecedented horror.

_AppSpo_ tried to squirm away when the smithy began his approach. The young brunet held him hard- perhaps a bit _too_ hard, but he felt that it was justified- to his side. The skinny mod quailed in the shadow of the smithy as he looked down at them.

The steam behind him had absorbed a sickly orange glow from the light of the roaring furnace.

_AppSpo_ had almost squirmed free. His bony hips were working loose of his grip as the young man tried to slip behind him, out of sight. Kaiba tried to readjust his hold, to make him stay and take responsibility for whatever the fuck madness he had just brought on them both, but his _confounded squirming_-

_AppSpo _popped free like the cork from a bottle, and with all the same determination, made haste to the door.

The smith was eying his metalwork speculatively.

In the real world, Seto Kaiba felt cold sweat trace a shivering line down his face.

_(No Evidence Available)_

_AppSpo_ was appreciative.

_"Oh! You clean up good, sir!"_

His appreciation was markedly tongue-in-cheek.

He was also staying pointedly out of reach.

Kaiba glowered at him.

_"I have been __**defiled**__. __**You**__ commissioned my __**defilement**__," _he told him acidly.

The American just looked at him.

_"You __**threw **__**me**__ into the __**Ant Queen.**__" _

_AppSpo_ was silent for a moment. _"…Besides, you needed to be cleaned."_

They looked at each other.

_"If I ever meet you in person-" _Kaiba menaced.

The American laughed. _"I know."_

Sullen, he beckoned him to his usual spot, ostensibly so that they could be on their way, back unto the land of unsullied- or, at least, _less_ sullied- adventures. _AppSpo_ prudently declined.

The street flickered, and Kaiba's eyes riveted on it.

For a moment, he wasn't sure if he'd imagined it. He _was_ tired. And stressed. It wasn't inconceivable that it could have been a malfunction within _his_ optic nerves, not the graphics..

But then-

The street flickered again.

His displeasure waxed homicidal.

Glitches weren't this self-contained. Glitches created peripheral problems. Glitches acted like so many dropped stitches in an old woman's knitting; everything fell apart around a glitch, reverting all of his hard work back into a pile of calculations that he had to shift through. Again.

This-

This was the result of _hacking_.

Someone had been hacking _his city_.

Someone was risking _his_ fastidious programming. Someone was hacking _his_ work. Someone was doing it _in_, and _to, __**his city**_.

Someone-

Someone had a death wish.

Bizarrely, the first thought that came to mind was _'Not in __**my**__ house.'_

The second was _'Calm down.'_

The third, fourth and fifth were speculations of what he _could_ do.

With all of Jennifer's hard work keeping him out prison, he felt somewhat obligated not to jeopardize his position over some low-rent idiots.

Furthermore, it didn't look like anything had actually been tampered with.

As he went through the system information, he realized what was causing the confusion. The hack was _exterior- _it had to do with the console, not the server. The console had been altered to allow multiple people to log in from a singular source. The system was confused because they'd had to falsify multiple IP addresses to fool_ Yggdrasill _into admitting them. With four times the input it should've had, the console was overclocking, hitting the server with too much information at once; something the server, understandably, had not been prepared for.

If the error was occurring here, then the problem was here. His perpetrators were nearby. It was likely that they'd just loaded in; unable to solve the problem itself, the server would eventually load everyone out and go into maintenance mode. As it was, it hadn't started running any of its many automatic system diagnostics yet.

_AppSpo_ was staring at him curiously. He realized that he'd been just staring at the street with his fists clenched, and shifted awkwardly.

The American fidgeted into turn, looked from the flickering street to him, and then raised his hands defenselessly. _"You're going to have to help me out here,"_ he said wryly.

Kaiba instinctively suppressed the urge to throw the smaller man an impatient look, despite knowing that his characterform didn't have the capacity to communicate facial expressions, anyway. _"We have come across an illegal operation," _he told him informatively. _AppSpo_ went through the motions of opening and closing his mouth and nodding his head in fierce affirmation, but it was fairly obvious that he had no idea what was happening.

Kaiba sighed and accessed the company's geolocation software.

The program had one purpose, and one alone: to compromise the privacy of those who caused obstructions.

First, it would locate and identify the party's original IP address. With that, it would then trace the IP's geographical origin. He would then force the offending party to load out, relieving the potential strain on the server.

With them firmly booted, he would alert the hub nearest to them, hopefully preventing the problem in the future.

And then he'd let it go.

But he'd be extremely grumpy about it.

He didn't like having to use the geolocation software. It was invasive. It made him feel intensely creepy. He wasn't particularly interested in where his customers kept their bodies while they immersed, and he didn't like looking as though he was.

A tinny _beep_ beside his ear. He looked.

'_Error.'_

'_Program not found.'_

He just stared.

_AppSpo_ was starting to get antsy, pacing around him in anxious circles. Kaiba looked up sharply, and he stopped.

_"I have to go,"_ he told him grimly, and loaded out without providing any explanation.

_(No Evidence Available)_

His already surreal life had just increased exponentially in absurdity.

He was fairly certain that he'd finally discovered what had been done in his lab on the fateful night that Nakamura had left it unlocked.

But it didn't make any _sense_.

He couldn't stop looking, bewilderment colouring his thoughts with a sort of twisted melting clocks humour that defied logical explanation.

_'It doesn't make any sense.'_

He furrowed his eyebrows. His eyes shifted from one unwanted modification to the other.

_'It just doesn't make any sense. Why…?'_

Most of the system's usually inactive software- the diagnostic and geolocation programs alike- were located on a computer separate from the ones that ran and stored _Yggdrasill's_ backup files. Those were, bizarrely, totally untouched.

This one had been altered in two separate ways: one, alarming; the other, puzzling.

Almost laughable.

The first alteration was so subtle that he wasn't surprised that they'd all missed it. As the neural centre of _Yggdrasill_'s system security, the computer in question had access to all others; a necessity. To be properly prepared for the possibility of file corruption, the backup files had to be accessible.

Someone had connected the security centre to an outside network. Given this computer's ability to access the others, that was a huge security compromise.

Except-

The second modification undid the first.

Someone had cut all of the network cables, shoved cotton batting in the cut ends, and meticulously taped them back together. It had taken him a few minutes to realize what had been done.

And it _didn't make any sense_.

Someone had set up remote access to the security centre.

Afterwards, they'd cut the security centre off from the rest of the system, thereby eliminating any possible profit that could have been gained from the first.

He was starting to wonder if he'd been mistaken in his assumption that most intelligent people were also possessing of sense. Previously, Jennifer had been the exception to that rule. Now, he was risking seriously entertaining the budding belief that she was simply the invading queen of a spectacularly intelligent and utterly ridiculous alien species. His temples ached like someone or something- possibly one of those very creatures- was trying very hard to puncture them with the wrong end of a screwdriver.

He ran a hand down his face and looked at his watch.

_'Tokigawa can deal with it.'_

_(No Evidence Available)_


	13. Chapter 13

_**Note:**__ I swear to God I'm not dead._

_I'm so sorry. _

_Edit: Apparently a higher power also reads __**NEA**__ and generously decided to gift me with virulent bronchitis._

_Thanks, life._

_After-Post Edit: Did some editing. Chapter went up in a rush because I knew I needed to update. Fixed some stuff I was unhappy with. Hopefully this flows better now._

_**Synopsis:**__ Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ UNF! That is the sound of my pelvic thrust. (Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh.)_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Thirteen_

_'How did I not see it?'_

Now that he had, it was so obvious.

Her eyes flicked over to him and away. She was nervous. They flicked back.

He almost laughed. _'How did I miss it?'_

Jii Tokigawa had been- and still was- as puzzled by the security breach as Kaiba had been himself.

He'd had been grateful for this; it had seemed to clarify to him that he had not, in fact, gone insane and missed the point. The situation was pointless to the extent of causing universal puzzlement- and hilarity.

Of course, now that he alone had grasped the punchline, it was hilarious in a lot of other ways, too; and some of them were making him feel rather devious.

Unusually full, the lab was still bustling with programmers, design team members and security staff, all itching to see and take a stab at solving the weirdest Kaiba Corporation sabotage attempt of the year. The air was abuzz with excitement.

The noise was distracting her. Her eyes kept sliding surreptitiously over to him and snapping away when she realized that he was still watching.

She was sweating, but not as a result of the environment. The development lab was actually slightly colder than the rest of the building; the chill was good for focus, and staring at computations and computer screens for hours had a mesmerizing effect; something he was personally familiar with. In the sprawling entirety of the Kaiba Corporation buildings, the only other place as cold was his office.

She was sweating, nonetheless.

As far as he was concerned, she deserved to sweat for a while.

There was a low mutter of laughter from the security centre; as professional as they usually were, the security team was having trouble taking the breach seriously. Even his normally steadfast and stone-faced security head, Tadashi Kimura- a man serious and loyal enough to keep not only his own mouth shut about a murder, but the rest of the security team's, as well- kept shaking his head and pointing at the re-taped wires, visibly puzzled.

The general mood of the company had lightened from tense expectation to baffled humour. The pervading question seemed to be: _'Who is this ridiculous?'_

He knew.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Tokigawa approaching his chair. The older man was shaking a disbelieving head. "I don't know, Kaiba-sama," he said earnestly. "I've never seen anything like this. If I had to, I'd venture explaining it as a scare tactic- a demonstration of invasive capability- but those are usually… well, more obvious, and less complex. And for an obvious reason; there's really no point in making a useless statement that no one notices for weeks."

He nodded curtly, careful to maintain his serious aspect. He wasn't feeling particularly inclined to be serious. Truthfully, he'd been so incredulous, so humiliated, so offended- and, ultimately, so baffled at his own failure to recognize it that he'd stopped being angry altogether.

He was, instead, feeling rather well-humoured, if somewhat malicious.

She was fidgeting again. Beside him, the design team head perked up.

"_Miss Jennifer_," he said warmly in English. Kaiba smirked at his pointed use of a marital singular.

In the corner of his eye, Tokigawa was smiling broadly. His look of relief was reminiscent of someone consulting an expert on the subject at hand.

And ludicrousness _was_ undeniably Jennifer's main area of expertise.

"_Miss Jennifer_," the team head greeted again as she shuffled closer, visibly unwilling. "Maybe you'd like to theorize on our… _ah_, interesting little debacle here?"

He was very obviously expecting her to say yes. Kaiba leaned forward expectantly when she started talking.

"Ah… I can't imagine I'd have any better theories than your own," she waffled, pulling her mouth out at the side in a crooked half-smile. "I'm not really up to snuff on my company politics and subterfuge; the daytime receptionist had to let me in on the specifics." She tried to laugh; it came out sounding tense and awkward. She was trying not to notice him watching her, and he knew it.

He'd caught it, buzzing around in his peripherals, when she'd shown up late.

She should have been the first person through the door, media fiasco or no.

He knew her. She'd grown attached to the development of _Yggdrasill. _Her first reaction should have been rage. Panic, maybe. Definitive discomfort of some kind.

When she hadn't shown up, he'd started puzzling about it. He knew that someone would've taken the time to inform her, even if only as an afterthought. He knew her habits; at this point, she should've been on edge, demanding to know why she hadn't been called; she should have been speculating about the purpose of this seemingly redundant compromise between invasion and seclusion; she should have been debating the chances that the two operations had been done on separate occasions.

A moment after the last thought had occurred to him, he'd dismissed it, realizing that it was totally irrational if one considered that the only breach of lab security had been either directly perpetrated by or as a result of Nakamura's alleged 'mistake'.

And then it had hit him. At that moment, he'd grasped it.

The last _was_ an irrational theory- unless the perpetrator was regularly inside the lab.

His methodical mind had then supplied: _'One of the perpetrators.'_

And everything had suddenly fallen effortlessly into place.

She'd strolled in quietly, prudently silent on the issue.

Seto Kaiba was many things, but he was not a fool.

Now, she was creeping towards the door; slowly, and with a laudable amount of subtlety that was lost on someone who'd been looking at her the entire time. He knew what she was doing; she hadn't dared to check if he was still watching her. In times of stress, she still prescribed to the childish 'If I can't see you, then you can't see me' adage of a six-year-old.

"Jennifer," he called to her, warning. His attempt to keep the malevolence from his voice had apparently failed; she looked definitively alarmed. He didn't really mind.

The sole of her sneaker squeaked reluctantly on the tile. She'd only half-turned, frowning nervously over her shoulder at him.

"…What?"

Petulance. She was nervous, wary, expectant. Not panicked. Not yet.

"Come here. I need to speak to you."

Her eyes flickered over to Tokigawa. She opened her mouth; most likely organizing some impending flippancy for release. _'Playing tough for me, Nauswell?'_ he thought, and cut her off.

"Alone, _Nakamura_."

It needed to be clarified, cliché or not. He knew her. She'd take any chance, make any excuse to avoid this; he could see that she'd started to catch on.

The malevolence of his tone had clued her into the realization that danger was fast approaching.

She was fidgeting again, her eyes locked onto his; Jennifer was starting to look markedly uneasy.

She glanced towards her workroom before opening her mouth again.

_'Inevitably to deny that there's anywhere to talk alone,'_ he thought, now well immersed in his own rather wicked feelings of dark humour. "It will do," he told her. She winced, sending Tokigawa a plaintive look. Tokigawa had already turned away, accosted by another team member, and her silent plea went unanswered.

Rising quickly, he snagged her by the small of her back before she had the chance to scoot away and enlist someone else in her defense. A low buzz of amusement filled the other half of the room. He ignored it. Her feet dragged black marks on the tile. She shuffled into her workroom with obvious reluctance.

He closed the door behind him, marvelling at how loudly the tongue of the latch slid into place when he wasn't being forced to sneak in and out. She was standing pointedly out of reach, in front of her work table- still covered in drying lumps of clay and a resultant layer of fine red-brown dust- and looking at him with an expression that teetered between feigned innocence and anxious impatience.

"What's your problem?" she asked; pointedly rude, as usual. Her voice was higher than normal, but only slightly, just bordering on the edge of shrill.

He threw her a hard smirk, amused. She winced again, edging backwards almost imperceptibly, and glanced over her shoulder. Judging distance, he knew; spatial awareness. A tiny physical _tic _of hers, self-effacing and defensive, anxious to know where she stood in relation to the table. Just in case.

Like him, Jennifer was also many things.

She was not, however, a terribly good liar. Her policy on secrets was more zippered-mouth and set jaw than any particular proficiency for deceit.

He, however, was quite good at misleading people when it was required. In his field, that was _not_ a useful business skill; his talent for it was based almost entirely in his sometimes-sadistic enjoyment of others' discomfort.

He thought about how to begin.

"You," he started, and then actually laughed, tempted just to quote her words and mimic her cadence.

He started again in English.

_"You've got quite the sense of humour,"_ he told her.

She threw him a slow, wary look. _"I would imagine that you already knew that."_

He shook his head, laughing through his nose.

_"I suppose."_

He paused, watching her carefully. She was shuffling almost imperceptibly backwards, checking the position of the table. Her hand kept drifting out from her side, seeing if the table was within easy touching distance. It wasn't.

He crossed his arms, purposefully contrary.

_"But, then again, I suppose you've always been fond of a little morbid irony, haven't you?"_

She slowed and stopped, fingertips stiff, just barely brushing the dusty table supports.

He couldn't suppress the smirk.

"_Really, now- Electrical tape and spun cotton? You disappoint me, Nauswell."_

She stared.

Her fingers were twitching almost imperceptibly.

He returned her stare comfortably. When she opened her mouth to speak, he cut her off.

_"When?"_

Fidgeting; a more noticeable anxious twitch in her thumb and index finger.

_"Employee dinner,"_ she mumbled. Her stare took on an expression of sullen, fixated misery that reminded him irrepressibly of a mouse he had found under the basement stairs of the orphanage- trapped in a mousetrap, back broken, but still alive. Its glittering black eyes had stared up through the shadows at him, unblinking.

"_Showed up early for Toshio; Jii showed me around the lab."_ That miserably resigned look._ "Got it done before the department heads got everybody together in the lobby. Said I had to use the bathroom; Toshio let me lock up. It might seem aimless to you, but I swear, I-"_

"_Didn't want to risk it? Panicked when you realized that I'd developed the technology to track Yggdrasill users?"_ he asked her drily. She blinked and jerked at little straighter, obviously startled. _"I can't imagine why you'd think I'd be so compelled to discover your location; but, thinking about it now, 'Apples and Spoons' __**would**__ be your first reaction to something I'd made, wouldn't it?"_

She jerked, twitched, jumped; all at once. As abrupt and stiff-jointed as a mannequin, she snapped her hand and head up and raised the extended finger in objection, opened her mouth to speak- and promptly snapped it shut, lips pulled back in a gloriously complex expression: a seamless combination of horror, humiliation, anxiety and confusion, and, just barely visible behind everything else, the darkest tinge of humour.

She started to fidget desperately, obviously trying to communicate something that she been robbed of the words for. He didn't blame her; but not blaming her didn't mean that was feeling generous enough to ease her discomfort.

She pulled her knees together with a tiny hollow-sounding _thwok _and flipped her hand out; all with an all-too-familiar and dearly missed expression of sheepishness. There was something else in there, too; Panic. Just a little bit; visible in the white of her eyes, a tiny twinge of the absolute visceral terror of those who found themselves totally lost. It helped.

Good humour or no, he still intended to know exactly what the fuck she'd been up to. And he could.

A truth had been broached; Jennifer was _AppSpo_.

He'd been so preoccupied with everything else, he'd failed to realize the symptoms of the terminal disease that he was so familiar with: _Jenniferitis Universalis,_ characterized by finding her everywhere with no explanation as to _why_. He wasn't content with that; if it was diagnosable, it was damn well explicable.

And he certainly wanted an explanation.

The symptoms had been there, and fairly obviously; the instant of recognition had been universal, not a creeping realization of surfacing facts. Her behaviour in _Yggdrasill_, uncharacteristically childish and playful, was markedly different from her more guarded aspect in life; but, examined more closely, there was nothing unusual about it. Jennifer's sleepless and eccentric waking life was fraught with confusion, seemingly crippled by her inability to differentiate reality from fantasy. A world in which she could be absolutely assured that _everything_ was unreal-

He could see the appeal. Subsequently, the release from anxiety. Different from his own, but a shunt for her ills nonetheless.

What he _didn't_ understand was what she was doing there in the first place, where she had gotten an immersion pod, how she had miraculously come across _him_, and why she'd continued immersing when she'd inevitably realized that it _was_ him, if she hadn't known from the beginning.

And, of course, why she'd been crawling all over him- and unabashedly, at that. When they were together in the real, physical sense, she reacted to his slightest touch like a branded animal.

He had to admit that the last query imparted in him a particularly piquant curiousity.

She was fidgeting, still at a loss for words.

He watched her patiently, leaning against the door. If she wanted to bolt, she could run the risk associated with having to go through him to do it.

He watched her consider and discount it, and was almost disappointed. He was curious what she would have tried- and what it would have led to.

Instead, she was still just fidgeting by the table, looking everywhere but at him.

"Um," she said decisively.

He quirked an eyebrow at her. She ran a nervous hand through her short hair- a motion so painfully familiar that he wanted to kick himself for not seeing it sooner.

She cracked a sheepish, anxious little smile. "Any specific questions?"

"When did you know?"

She winced at his whipcrack tone, and set her jaw slightly awry. A little tense; it was an awkward, palpably embarrassed motion. "_Fe allech chi __ladd mi heb gyffwrdd fi," _she admitted. "Ex-girlfriend chat. I didn't know what to say; I just started talking because it was _so fucking awkward-"_

He interrupted her. "Why were you there?"

She stopped, the confusion surfacing above the panic. "What? I explained that. I was moderating for the Detroit hub, and what with the move, I-"

Another necessary interruption. "Why were you playing in the first place?"

For a second, she looked completely lost.

And then she laughed.

The awkward complexity of her expression faded into extreme wryness. "That's… kind of a long story."

He gestured dismissively, shifting into a more comfortable position against the door.

"Thanks to you, I've got time."

She paused halfway through hoisting herself up onto her dusty worktable, thin arms shaking with strain as she stopped to give him a narrow, nervous stare. "What? What does that mean?"

She had to stop, drop back down to the floor, and repeat the process of hoisting herself up. He gestured dismissively again. "Your 'long story', Nauswell?"

She looked a little disgruntled. "I wish you'd stop switching between all of my names. I feel like I'm back with my mother- _'Jennifer Kyouko Nauswell, what have you done now?' _" she seethed through her teeth, wagging her index finger back and forth in menacingly sharp movements. Jennifer dropped her hand into her lap, laughing. "Man, if you'd stop cutting your hair and shrank a few inches- and me without my glasses- you might even look a bit like her."

She stopped laughing abruptly, looking a little perturbed at herself.

"Um… well… that… was rather Oedipal."

He ignored that in favour of a less questionable discovery.

"_Kyouko?"_ he asked, somewhat incredulous. She threw him a petulant look of disdain.

"It's my mother's name. It could've been worse; I got 'Jennifer' because my dad didn't want to name me Geneviève, _his_ mother's name." She looked down for a second, and then gave him a very serious look. "My family is ridiculously French."

He raised an eyebrow. "Ah." There was a moment of strained, awkward silence. She continued her nervous chattering about her family and their names. He glowered at her, wondering if it was something she'd picked up from her husband. "Stalling is pointless; like I said, I've got time." He threw her a wry smirk, feeling suddenly darkly whimsical. "Now: Your story, Jennifer Kyouko '_AppSpo' _Nauswell Nakamura?"

She threw him a disgusted look. "_Oui, oui, maman, la patience, s'il vous plait. _Ugh… Seriously, don't do that. It's creepy."

He looked at her.

She sighed.

On her face surfaced that initially hidden expression of remarkable dark humour. He found it strangely prepossessing.

"Toshio bought me an account and console for our first anniversary," she said simply.

Kaiba raised his eyebrows. She laughed.

"What? Don't look at me like that."

"That's a rather expensive gift," he told her, sounding more aggressive than he meant to. The truth was that hearing the details of her marriage made him somewhat…

Displeased. Uncomfortable. Restless.

He wasn't willing to accept the proposition that she could be happy in such a trite domestic position. It seemed ludicrous.

It seemed _wrong_.

However wrong it was or seemed, he knew that it was true; in the midst of their very first encounter as their _Yggdrasillian _counterparts, she - or he, at the time- had told him _"My husband bought it to keep me occupied."_

And that had been that. She, herself, in real time, as Jennifer- the Jennifer, _his _Jennifer, for _fuck's sakes_- had frequently mentioned the same instances of boredom and her other half's attempts to keep them at bay; the introduction of clay modelling into her life had been one of those, and he could only suppose that her habit of crafting nightmarish creations had been prompted by the introduction of his gaming system into her life for exactly that same purpose.

He came to a sudden realization.

He knew _why_ he was uncomfortable with that prospect.

Somehow, however unknowing or unintended, Nakamura's use of _Yggdrasill_, _his_ creation, to subdue _his_ Jennifer, brought to life an implicit feeling of having been used. He wasn't someone who liked facilitating the laziness of others at the best of times; for it to be, of all people, Nakamura, and for his creation to have been facilitating Nakamura's attempts to mask his own inability to satisfy his wife, a woman who, incidentally, just happened to be the very same Jennifer who'd minced cheerfully out of his life four years before-

He scrubbed at his scalp in irritation. Now was not the time.

"Don't _do_ that," the Jennifer in question told him again, this time with an expression of acute nervousness. She'd started tapping her foot restlessly against the table's supports.

He gave her a distinctly grumpy look from under his now-slightly-less-perfect fringe. She fidgeted, sticking her tongue out at him irreverently.

She still looked nervous.

"Your brother does that when he's about to do something very stupid," she told him informatively.

Kaiba gave her another rather grumpy look, feeling rather generous. "Continue," he snapped.

She laughed a little at that, but he could see that she was still watching him carefully from under her eyelashes. "Like I said, Toshio bought me an immersion pod. As for it being expensive? Ah, well… the market for artists of all kinds was better then, especially in Chicago. We were doing more than alright for ourselves. Toshio's a bit of a traditionalist, and if I didn't have to, then he didn't want me working; He was dead-set on us having a baby. Funny, isn't it?"

Her expression took a turn into a dark place that he was coming all too familiar with.

Similarly, he did not find the prospect of their having a baby together particularly_ funny _at all.

All it served to remind him of was the infuriating fact that the last person she'd willingly touched was an imbecile that he was exceedingly reluctant to have shared territory with.

He resisted the urge to scrub his fingers under his hair again; it was a bizarre cleansing ritual, a fruitless attempt to force the unwanted speculations of his head, and inevitably useless.

She was watching him silently again. He stared impatiently back at her.

She fidgeted and shifted further back onto the table.

"That said, I almost killed him for it," she said flippantly.

For some reason, that made him feel even worse.

"Despite having almost nothing to do, I resisted loading in for… Oh… maybe a month. Around that." She threw him a wary little smirk that he didn't return. "Eventually I gave in; I'm not much for soap operas except in… very specific circumstances," she said drily.

He wasn't sure how he felt about that particular gem of a reference; he didn't think it had been intended to make him hopeful, but he was interested, nonetheless, to discover that it was on her mind.

"Of course, when I logged in, I discovered the account had been registered as male. Not too much of a bother to me, but I suppose it lead to some… misunderstandings." She smiled her crooked smile again. He caught her meaning. If the dots had connected and produced 'female' instead of 'flamboyantly gay male', he probably would have had her from the start.

Too familiar with Pegasus, however, he hadn't even questioned it.

She seemed to follow his thought process, and giggled.

He felt suddenly very paranoid. _AppSpo_ had regularly demonstrated a disturbing power of observation; one he'd only witnessed occasionally from Jennifer. His most immediate explanation for that irregularity was that she normally did not communicate her insights.

He didn't like that.

Though a disturbing place her brain most assuredly was, given the option, he would have gladly accepted the task of being privy to her most private thoughts. It was, simply put, better than not knowing.

He eyed her narrowly, comforting by the fact that he had at least one insight today: He knew now that she was not conspiring against him, per se. In fact, her motives were somewhat more… domestic.

Even somewhat silly, if he considered them in relation to the average anti-Kaiba Corporation conspirator.

He eyed her silently.

She continued her restless, increasingly anxious fidgeting.

"_Continue_," he told her acidly.

She laughed at that. "I don't know what to tell you. I met you. I realized who you were." She ran a hand through her hair, visibly exasperated. "You were _there_ for most of this, Kaiba."

He pressed his lips into a line, unimpressed. He had known that it was too much to hope that her openness about the past issues surrounding his foster father had continued up until the present; if that'd been the case, he would've known about the issue at hand much sooner.

But therein lay the issue itself.

He didn't want to volunteer what he knew, involuntarily limiting her responses to what she knew that she could get away with. She wouldn't lie to him, but he was certain that she'd omit integral facts if she thought that she could.

He settled for another question; something innocuous, relatively ambiguous. "Why didn't you stop?"

That familiar flit of confusion. "After I realized that it was you?" she asked.

He gestured sharply, affirmatively. Impatiently. She laughed again, this time with audible discomfort.

Darkness and confusion fled behind a look of absolutely exquisite embarrassment and reluctance.

He raised an eyebrow. _'That's an interesting reaction.' _

The tapping of her foot against the table leg grew more aggravated.

"I'd already been playing for three years," she whined. There was a powerful note of protestation in her voice. "Leaving off my primary hobby because I ran into my… um… _ex-boyfriend_ seems slightly immature, doesn't it?"

Skirting the issue. It was a reasonable explanation, but it didn't encompass all of the aspects that he was looking for. "You could have avoided me," he shot back at her.

She exuded palpable sheepishness and shame, but was silent.

He raised both eyebrows at her. "In fact, you also could have avoided using me as a vehicle," he said drily, and then paused to stare her down. "Or a playground."

Her face went a truly appalling shade; one that rendered the clay around her a dull brown in comparison.

The ceiling above the door had suddenly gained a very fascinating quality that he was, as of yet, unable to discern.

She was silent.

As angry as he wanted to be, he was having a great deal of difficult containing his laughter. Even without speaking, everything about her posture and expression screamed _'Please, God, someone kill me.' _

She glanced at him briefly and abruptly went even redder.

He couldn't hold in a mirthful little snort, and she crossed her arms and scowled at him in response. "You-" she snapped, and then stopped and stared him down, arms crossed tightly across her chest.

It was an interesting expression. She was still flushed, obviously discomfited and ultimately unwilling to share, but she held his gaze with a malevolent intensity he'd grown to expect and enjoy. It _usually_ meant that she was about to pick a fight with him.

It wasn't the fighting itself that he enjoyed; it was the aftermath, which didn't really qualify as making up. He was fairly certain that most reconciliations didn't leave lasting welts.

Unfortunately for him, they'd had this fight before.

"_You_ threw me into the ant queen," she said primly.

He was struck by memory- and subsequent inspiration.

"_I_ warned you," he said silkily.

It took her approximately three seconds of confused and horrified staring to realize what he was referring to.

She moved so quickly that it took him a moment to locate her.

She was huddling behind the table, peering up at him over the edge like an expectant soldier.

He quirked an eyebrow. She raised her head and stuck out her tongue petulantly. "Don't be a pussy," she needled. "There was nothing wrong with that blacksmith." She rolled her head to the side; he could just see half of a wide, crooked grin. "He cleaned you up nice, didn't he? I didn't get charity like that from the ant queen that _you happened to throw me into!_" she said hotly.

There was a moment's pause. She sank behind the table, only her fingertips still peeking above, clasping the wood.

"This is the nerdiest argument I have ever had. We're colossal geeks. Oh my God."

He couldn't contain a laugh. "I run a _games development company,_" he emphasized sceptically.

She raised her head; just a little. Her glasses glinted dim reflections on the table.

"How long are you going to keep me in this room?"

He smirked.

"When are you going to try to get out?"

She was quietly speculative.

"Why did I ever like you?"

His smirk dropped. _'Ouch.'_ That hadn't been what he was hoping to hear. "You tell me," he coaxed, trying to sound indifferent. The statement came out too aggressively. He frowned again.

She giggled.

"Settle for some exposition and subsequent release? I know you _love_ nosing around in my business," she said drily.

When he failed to respond with anything other than the same stare he'd been giving her since she'd arrived, she rolled her eyes over the table at him. "_Indubitablement_, you are a master of persuasion, _monsieur_. Alright."

A pause; a sudden look of oddly intense interest. He could hear her jaw working pensively.

"Why do _you_ think I married Toshio?" she asked.

A frank question, and one that had caught him off-guard. He blinked, startled. "You wanted to," he asserted warily; it came out sounding more like a question than he liked.

She ducked her head out of sight and laughed inaudibly through her teeth. Only her fingers still peeked over the edge. He frowned. "I don't see what this has to do with-"

It was her turn for necessary interruptions.

"Four years ago, my mother disowned me."

He stopped. Looked for her. She hadn't resurfaced. Her right index finger was drawing restless circles and squares in the thin layer of red dust on the table. Her left hand kept disappearing into and reappearing out of the shadows.

Her head and eyes flicked up, only briefly, to him. "I have your attention now? Good." He heard her rattle out another unhappy little laugh. "If you think that the only reason I left was because of our mutual history with _Red_, you're pretty fucking stupid," she said flatly. He resisted another frown.

Her voice was echoing eerily under the table; resonating in the hollow metal supports of the under table storage.

"I didn't know what the hell to do when you dropped that particular bombshell. Everything I could think of saying or doing just seemed ludicrous. After everything, after we'd finally gotten our own stupidity sorted out, suddenly spouting 'Honey, we need to talk- I may have pushed your foster father out of a window. Fancy that!' seemed somewhat… inappropriate," she said dryly. Her eyes flicked up again; even narrowed, they were full of dark, dry mirth.

"I don't know if you remember; in the school office, there was this package for me- it was there for almost a month before I bothered to get it. It was just some of the sweaters I'd left behind. Really, it was probably because my mother didn't realize that it doesn't get colder here than in Colorado." He saw one of her bony shoulders surface briefly; the visible ten percent of an indifferent shrug. "Anyway, I'd been thinking about my family a lot. Even if you spoil the crap out of that boy, watching you with Mokuba made me… sort of lonely, I guess."

She looked up again, this time more firmly, and rested her chin on the table. An expression of painful wryness pulled her lips thin. "When I went home the morning after- Um. When I got home, and… I didn't have to act normal anymore, I… panicked. I called my mom. I told her everything. All of it. Ceri, Red, you, everything. I just didn't know what else to do."

Neither the warm yellow lighting of the room nor the rich hue of the clay that covered everything could disguise the sudden shiver that travelled down her fine-boned frame. She ducked out of sight again.

An audible swallow. "I think… well, I wasn't thinking, but I'd really hoped that she'd help me. Even… just listening, for once, because I'd never talked to her about anything before. Never. I suppose I'd operated under the assumption that parents have an obligation to love their children."

An inaudible little laugh, even darker.

"I was mistaken."

Her voice had gone quiet in a way he was still unused to. "When I left your house that day, I would've sworn to anyone who asked that my problems were worse than theirs. Everything seemed so fucking _serious_ back then."

A hoarse bark of amusement.

"Now? Jesus."

She jolted up to her feet and suddenly shook herself, running a hand down her face. It left dusty red streaks high on her cheek. She didn't seem to notice.

"She said… a number of things I won't repeat, but the gist of it was that giving birth to me had ruined her life. She told me not to come home again. Ever." She suddenly smiled genuinely, if somewhat wryly. "Being, of course, the obliging person that I am…"

He gestured silently and impatiently, absorbed. Her smile quirked with her eyebrow. He was glad, at least, to see that her mood had improved with the slight change of topic.

She stood and stretched- and _winced_ as her back popped and cracked. "Crazy hateful bigot or no, she's still my mother. It didn't really occur to me that I had a choice of whether or not to go back in the first place; I had to be sure that she was serious. Of course, once I was there, it occurred to me that I couldn't really come back _here_," she said dryly.

He crossed his arms contentiously. "Why not?" She just threw him an exasperated look.

"I _know_ you," she laughed with a small, markedly crooked smile. "Leaving without a word and coming back without an explanation? Fuck, you would've _killed_ me. Whether you like it or not, you've calmed down a lot since you were a teenager."

He didn't like it, and it _wasn't_ true. He hadn't calmed down; he'd just gotten better at looking calm. And he wouldn't have killed her- he would have hounded her until she cracked.

This was, essentially, exactly the same thing he was currently in the process of doing.

He decided, prudently, to keep that to himself.

"Alright," he said. "I'll accept that."

She stopped and eyed him warily; narrowly.

Expectantly.

He could still feel her looking at him when he exited the room.

Even Tokigawa's irrepressibly smug expression of knowing couldn't stop her eyes from dragging nails down his back.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Toshio Nakamura was resigned.

He felt distinctly like a still-bleeding piece of bait in a closing circle of sharks.

When he'd presented himself to them, the Kaiba Corporation security staff had lit up with excitement; most of the mutters flying through the air had meant nothing to him, but the few he'd comprehended had just made him resigned.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, he knew who they were waiting for. It wasn't an interview he anticipated with excitement. Particularly not now.

He smoothed the papers with long fingers, looking down over the fine print once more.

He hadn't discounted her decision as a possibility before he'd returned, but the rumours he'd heard circulating in whispers between the security staff made him nervous as to _why_. _Why_ she'd decided that now was a good time. The possibility that his abandoning her wasn't the _why _in question.

And the possibilities of that _why_ made him nervous.

He didn't really want to speak to the potential _why_, as it were.

All of her eccentricities and foibles aside, she was still his _wife_.

Whether it was affection or apathy on her part, he did love her.

Toshio Nakamura was not stupid.

He was very aware of Jennifer's sometimes wild nature. She was incapable of hiding it completely. Unfortunately for him, he'd thought that she hadn't been capable at all; he'd thought that she'd been getting better. Calmer. Sweeter.

He frowned at the papers again.

She'd just been getting quieter.

The squeak of a dress shoe on the tile.

The lights in the interview room were too bright; he avoided raising his head, and told himself that the lights were _why._ Not the _why_ in front of him. It was just too bright.

"_Nakamura_," Kaiba greeted coldly.

He inclined his head quickly, casually; almost disrespectfully. He heard his sometime employer snort.

An uncomfortable silence stretched on. Nakamura let it. The nervous desire to humour- to avoid offense- had all but abandoned him.

He flipped to the second page.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Kaiba watching him with a familiarly smug expression. He sighed and looked up at him.

Kaiba raised an eyebrow. "Do you have something to say to me, Nakamu-"

"Are you fucking my wife?"

The young brunette's expression teetered between blank shock and wonderment; in any other circumstance, Toshio Nakamura would have laughed.

At that moment, however, he wasn't feeling particularly humoured.

Apparently, Kaiba was.

First one eyebrow rose, then the other. He mouth quirked sideways in a smirk. His eyes flickered down to the papers under Nakamura's hands.

Toshio resisted the urge to pull them closer, out of sight. It wasn't as though it would make a difference. She'd made up her mind.

Kaiba pulled the cover sheet out from beneath his fingers.

He laughed.

Toshio glowered back at him, doing his best to disguise the leaden feeling pulling the air from his lungs.

Kaiba tossed the paper back on to the table; smiled at him with an expression of damning sweetness.

His eyes glittered in the too-bright fluorescents. His voice held a low, breathy turn of laughter.

"I was fucking your wife long before you knew her."

Toshio buried his head in his hands.

The second page of the divorce papers crinkled under his shifting elbow.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Jennifer's muscles _ached_.

Her day was getting progressively more miserable.

Already wracked by the anxiety and guilt the Kaiba manor incurred in her, she'd found her night haunted by the same inexplicable flushes of heat that had beset her over the last two days, breaking only to leave her shivering under quickly cooling sweat in the artificial breeze of an overactive air conditioning system; when she'd finally found herself able to doze, Tokigawa had called her to inform her of the security breach.

After that, she'd found herself systematically checking her escape routes, determined not to have to deal with the locust-like infestation of reporters and photographers surrounding the premises- and, in the end, she'd ended up in the orchard behind the garden gate, climbing the same fucking tree she'd climbed four years before, shimmying down a quickly-narrowing bow towards the top of a mouldering brick wall.

The afterglow of triumph she'd felt in light of her daring deed was quickly dampened by the discovery of an old door just a few yards down.

And, as if that pointless little adventure hadn't whittled down her nerves enough, she'd arrived at her workplace just in time to wish that she'd never come.

She wasn't sure which had disturbed her more: the fact that he was so dangerously close to knowing or the fact that he'd let her off so easily.

And with such a sinister look.

She'd actually been looking forward to coming home, eager to find the younger Kaiba brother for a number of reasons. Her life had been a crowded whirlwind of confusion, coloured by the elder Kaiba's suspicion following the discovery of the tape; and, thanks to the media storm outside, she was trapped into playing house with him. Over the last two days, her apparently titillating- and mostly fictionalized- story had shifted to the second page; a place of only slightly less pressure. The paparazzi held firm, and she was determined to, as well. She could do a siege.

Unfortunately, the pressure outside of the house was no more daunting than the pressure inside.

She'd decided to bend the rules a little.

She and Mokuba hadn't had chance to go over the circumstances surrounding the apparently welcome death of the boy's stepfather; she was reluctantly certain that he was still entertaining some misconceptions about the matter.

Of course, spending an evening reminiscing with the teen had another payoff; his presence, even if it came with an irrational temperament and over-exuberant affections, offered temporary freedom from the older Kaiba's probing questions- if not his probing stares.

Finding Mokuba had been the easy part.

Clarifying that she hadn't been on a crusade to save him or his brother from their tormenter- also easy. Discovering that he was still convinced of his mad and passionate love for her- less so.

She'd dropped that questionable subject and they'd moved on to more domestic things. She should have been able to relax; keeping one eye open for any stupid inclinations was enough with Mokuba. Unlike his brother, his impulses tended to wreak havoc on his composure. She knew when he was getting ideas.

They'd talked about television. They'd talked about politics. They'd talked about music.

Comfortable subjects.

And then everything went to hell.

She'd asked if he was familiar with an obscure old song that she'd always held dear; when he'd said that he wasn't sure, she'd whistled it for him.

She'd sensibly taken his look of shock and rapidly sickening pallor as her cue to stop.

The words _"That's Gozaburo's song,"_ had lidded a full day of unhappy discoveries and things she'd never wanted to know.

Then and now, the thought had surfaced desperately:

_'Don't think about it.'_

Somewhere inside of her, she'd felt the tiny pop of an old filament finally breaking. In that old bar, the one that her emotions only ever left half-drunken notes in, the last dim bulb on an old string of Christmas lights above the bar had died quietly, leaving the hanging glasses inside dark and empty.

_'Don't think about what it means.'_

Too late-

_'Don't think about it, don't think about it, you know better than to think about it, **don't think about it**.'_

It was too late. Too fast. The sensible part of her mind had outrun her.

_'Please. Please. Don't make me think about it.'_

She'd finally come to a realization that she'd been fighting since birth.

_'...I never wanted to know this.'_

Her glass had never been half-full.

Even the searing heat and soothing pressure of the water sheeting down from the showerhead couldn't untangle the knots in her muscles. Losing the will to keep her hands tense and flat, her fingernails dragged a slow repetitive beat down the tiling on the wall, hitting each thin strip of bare grout with a _tic_ not quite audible over the hiss of the shower.

She didn't want to think about it.

She didn't want to think about _anything_.

In a moment of weakness, someone had filled her skull with cotton balls and needles and her muscles with half-rusted nails. She was certain of that. She could _feel_ the evidence jostling between her bones when she moved.

Getting out of the shower was a greater effort than she could ever remember putting forth.

Discovering that her clothing was missing from the counter inspired in her the strong desire to get back in, sit down, and never leave again.

Instead, she stalked out in a towel- mercifully much larger and more luxuriant than she was accustomed to. _'Small blessings,'_ she mused silently.

Her stretched patience fought with budding amusement. She could only assume that this was Mokuba's ill-planned and ill-fated sudden move; examined from a future perspective in which she wasn't left wandering the halls swaddled in only a few yards of terrycloth, it was hilarious. An eighteen-year old boy running around with an armful of women's clothing- she could picture it.

The boy had the makings of a college fraternity terror.

Unfortunately, she _was_ distressingly without attire; in the truest state of_ dishabille_.

She could return to her room and change, it was true.

But she had a point to prove. She wasn't about to be cornered by spontaneous _frat tricks_, for fuck's sakes. She knew that if she let this incident slide, the next one would be more daring.

The younger Kaiba had as much of a penchant for _pushing_ as the older, but none of his directness.

Seto Kaiba challenged.

Mokuba Kaiba circumvented.

Somewhere between the two, there was safety from both. It was finding that safety that was causing her some difficulty.

In the meantime, her legs were getting cold, and the second floor's already immaculate hardwood had been waxed; with every lift and fall of a footstep, she felt her still-damp feet slowly slipping outwards towards tragedy. The last thing she needed at the moment were more bruises- stinging sensations to accessorize her bone-deep tetanus ache and burning musculature.

Unfortunately, Mokuba had hidden himself expertly.

She wondered absently why it had never occurred to her to simply _hide _from the elder Kaiba during her first stay in his home.

She had a sudden feeling of uncomfortable conviction that he would just have found her anyway.

She'd forgotten how quiet the mansion was. _'All sleeps in Transylvania,'_ came the vague thought. The sound of her feet against the wood was eerie and repetitive; a series of inconstant _slap-shht slap-shht_s echoing until the echoes faded out of hearing range, down another hallway that Mokuba inevitably wasn't in.

She had battled the paranoid fear that he'd left the premises; it was a stupid thought. If this was Mokuba's _push_, he'd be nearby. It only made sense.

Her subconscious made uncomfortable noises to the contrary. She chewed her lip speculatively and pulled another quickly slipping foot in and forward.

_Push_ and run, she wondered. It fit in a way she didn't like. _'Kid always has had a bad streak of the passive-aggressive,'_ she thought discontentedly. The idea of making a move and then making a break for it seemed stupid to her, but she wasn't Mokuba. Mokuba wasn't his brother, either. _'Circumvent,'_ she thought again, and swore aloud. It was a spectacularly stupid thought, and one she hoped he wasn't short-sighted enough to have pursued.

Lush carpet pushed up between her toes. She blinked, startled out of her musings, and looked down. Strange familiarity. Red and gold, but her feet told her that the gold was coarser. Some kind of mix. Standard fibre and something else. Something metallic. An old-fasioned pattern; imitation Victorian, maybe, all loops, swirls and leaflike protrusions. The kind of stylish that screamed _pretentious_ or _insecure_. Maybe both.

Conviction. This had been here before the current tenants. She knew to expect crisp, precise geometry from the elder Kaiba. Rocket-ship aesthetics. This wasn't his. This was _his._

_'Red carpet,'_ she thought spitefully. _'How appropriate.'_

She searched for the repeating point, something anxious and compulsive waking in her aching head. Her eyes followed the swooping patterns, out and out, looking for the tell-tale blip of repetition in the carpet.

She found a dress shoe, and looked up.

Jennifer strangled a squawk.

Her first thought was _'That fucking __**chair**__-'_

Followed by _'I should definitely leave.'_

She didn't leave. She examined him, fascinated- and, admittedly, a little bit envious.

Seto Kaiba was sleeping in the library.

Enfolded in the plush scarlet fabric of that easy-chair, eyes closed and breathing slow, his long fingers laxly steepled over the spine of a book lying half-open in his lap-

She felt, as she had uncountable times before, the intense desire to fall asleep and never wake up.

Her inability to do so incurred the strong desire to kick him awake.

She winced at her own petulance and looked at him again.

His hair was getting longer; the wisps of hair that lay over his nose shifted with every slow exhalation of breath. She felt the sudden implacable urge to smooth them out of his face and shuffled forward almost without realizing it.

The hardbound book was the same deep red as the chair. His fingers were obscuring the title.

Like the pattern in the carpet, like old wallpaper, like crooked paintings and improperly folded maps, it was _bothering_ her in a way that only arbitrary things did. She shifted her towel tighter around her; shuffled even closer, trying to peer sideways through his fingers.

_'This is incredibly stupid,'_ she thought tersely, annoyed with herself.

She reached out to gently push his hand aside.

She would later recall that he was the variety of light sleeper that woke suddenly and completely rather than dazed.

She would also applaud her instinctive defense of what tenuous modesty she could salvage.

In that moment, however, her only reaction was a half-strangled cry of protest, followed by a shaken and disgruntled-

"Oh, _fuck off_."

He looked amused. The book popped out from between them with an almost-inaudible _shhk_ that could have been paper tearing or nothing at all. She looked.

It was a translation of Dostoevsky's _The Brothers Karamazov_.

She felt an inexplicable twinge of disappointment for not having read it. Not having read it made the whole ordeal seem pointless, somehow.

The spine of the book hit the floor with a solid-sounding thump.

She was- more explicably- reminded strongly of the last time she'd found herself watching Kaiba set something aside with an expression of such smug ill intent.

_'Not last,'_ the back of her mind reminded her grumpily. _'First. Most certainly __**not**__ the last.'_

She told her mind to kindly fuck off, thank you, and it complied.

She suddenly felt a much delayed sense of vulnerability and nervousness.

He smiled at her.

She told him to fuck off, too.

He failed to comply. Instead, he just laughed and pulled her closer. She shifted her grip on the towel's top edge, holding it tightly closed around her.

His hands were travelling up her bare thighs.

_'Don't think about it.'_

"I really do hate you," she told him informatively.

He was, as usual, unperturbed. He didn't even pause. Hell, he wasn't even _looking_ at her. He was looking appreciatively at exposed skin between his fingers.

And, with a tone of undisturbed confidence, all he said was, "You don't."

The sun had relit beneath her skin. Uncomfortable heat overtook her face.

_'Don't think about it.'_

To top it all off, she had the beginnings of a truly wicked migraine.

"I really do," she retorted, and grabbed the bottom edge of the towel protectively. When he showed no inclination towards stopping his approach, she threw him a half-hearted glower.

All other things aside, the stroking massage of his fingers on her aching muscles felt unbelievably soothing. She didn't want to have to stop him. It felt _good_. She hadn't felt good in what seemed like a very long time.

_'Don't think about it. Just go. Don't even think about it.'_

There was no denying that she already had reasons enough to deny him.

_'Don't you even think about, Jennifer.'_

There was also no denying that her reason very rarely outwitted her instincts.

_'Don't you **dare**.'_

Unfortunately, she had come to yet another horrible realization; one that pandered to both sides unscrupulously.

_'Don't you even think about it. This is so fucking **wrong**.'_

She'd inadvertently spent the entire day giving him the wrong impression.

From her more than questionable actions in virtual reality- which really weren't explicable without admitting that she'd missed touching him, which was the last thing she wanted to explain at the moment- to the easily misconstrued action of officially separating from her husband, she'd accidentally sent up a gigantic blaze of suggestion.

And then she'd wandered into that same fire barely clothed.

_'Don't you **dare**.'_

Her subconscious, never subdued for long, sent her a pulse of derisive amusement. _'Always free cheddar in the mousetrap, Jennifer,'_ it told her helpfully.

She didn't have the heart to tell it to fuck off again when she knew that it was absolutely right.

She'd found the wrong brother.

Intelligently, she had then reacted to finding him in exactly the wrong way.

She swore aloud and slapped one of his hands as he stroked a thumb experimentally down her inner thigh.

_'Don't- Don't- Do **not**-'_

He was looking at her. She jerked back a little and then listed forward again, pulling the bottom of the towel firmly down.

"Fuck _everything_ today," she muttered.

"That sounds like a rather destructive philosophy," he replied casually.

She glared at him, trying to hunch modestly without bringing herself too close. A nervous flutter of totally different heat was building behind her navel.

The fringe of hair over his face was still slightly unkempt, but not unkempt enough to obscure that piercing stare.

She felt betrayed. If it wasn't going to sit neatly, it could at least do her the courtesy of not allowing her to see his eyes trace down from her throat to the nervous hand that held the bottom edge modestly low, careful not to descend too far. With every shift, however minute, she could feel her knuckles skimming the crisp fabric of his pants.

_'Don't fucking think about it. Don't.'_

He was too fucking _close_.

"I'm feeling rather destructive," she said finally, looking over the armrest for the glossy cover of the lost book.

His hands squeezed enticingly. "Look at me," he coaxed.

She could feel his breath skimming her ear.

_Definitely_ too close.

_'Please, God, don't.'_

She looked up reluctantly. The tip of his nose brushed hers lightly. He seemed strangely pleased with himself. She asked him why in language much less polite than she'd originally intended.

"You're not running away," he clarified, stroking his thumb down again.

Another slap to his hand and a scowl.

_'Don't- Do not do- Do. **Not**.'_

His eyelashes were looking down at her.

"A fucking _towel_," she objected grumpily.

The warm of breeze of his laughter made her acutely aware of how the hair she'd tucked behind her ears skimmed the skin below them.

"Nothing I haven't seen before," he said glibly before looking down again with an expression of intense interest. He was silent for a moment. He looked thoughtful. "You're much softer than I remember you being," he commented.

His fingers were trying to push sneakily past hers. She slapped his hand yet again.

_'Don't- An out- There's got to be one-'_

"So I got fat in America," she muttered rudely, trying in vain to keep her increasingly achy and incoherent brain in her head and out of her abdomen. "Fuck you."

A resurfacing feeling of betrayal as those luminous, shattered glass eyes made their way back up to her face. The familiar feeling of her senses abandoning her for safer shores.

Her head was suddenly too quiet.

"Looks good on you." A thoughtful pause and a teasing cast of amusement in his voice. "And I'd like that."

She felt the heat in her face rise to a feverish pitch.

A faint thought of escape. A moment of inspiration.

"And here I thought matrimony had made me dowdy and unapproachable," she needled. She could feel her words slurring around her tongue and wondered why.

He stiffened. His fingers cut painful lines into her legs. The pain sent up a tentative blaze of coherence.

_'Eureka,'_ the last functioning part of her brain articulated.

She winced and persisted.

"Nice to know all those advice columnists haven't just been talking crap about domestic bliss all these years," she burbled, trying to sound prim. Sweat or water was snaking down her spine; an inexplicable shiver. He was watching her intently, expression totally unreadable. She resisted the urge to fidget nervously. "God knows I always thought it was the pilgrim road to asexuality; I must be at the last truck stop before I-"

She'd forgotten how soft his lips could be.

The air was suddenly gone from the room.

His blank expression had given way to a marked look of discontent.

"Stop talking."

She gaped without really knowing why.

The snide commentary of her subconscious had gone mysteriously silent.

She guessed that it had sensed the coming fireworks; someone had struck a match on her face. The skin had lit instead of the match-head.

The powderkeg in her skull was seconds from ignition.

And his fingers were trying to push past hers _yet again_.

She surprised herself by laughing and turned away uncomfortably.

The smell of gunpowder was making her surprisingly dizzy.

She barely felt his fingers pull her face back towards him, but she did see his sudden expression of shock.

"You're sick," he told her unnecessarily.

She had a moment of weird clarity.

"No," she explained calmly, "this always happens on airplanes."

The fireworks never came.

Jennifer's world plummeted into blissful darkness and silence.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	14. Chapter 14

_**Note:**__ Once again, I take forever to update._

_Haha! Of course, the first reviewer to discover chapter thirteen would be __**WandererRaen**__; I missed you, you funny, funny girl. Yes, you were right. So proud of yourself!_

_Double-Edit: Thank you for your reviews, __**Guptanation**__; I'm not meaning to make the plot or characters convoluted or confusing, though! I really hope I haven't over-complicated anything, but because I've been doing this for so long, everything seems very simple and straight-forward to me. _

_I debated whether or not to make __**AppSpo**__ Jennifer. If I'd been writing differently, I wouldn't have. I __**did**__ because this story is as much based on a fanfiction cliché as __**You're So Spoiled!**__ was. It's less immediately obvious, so many of you may not have noticed, but it's there._

_**NEA**__ is based off of the __**Everything is Jennifer**__ cliché. Original character stories in which the character is, for some reason, related to absolutely everything that happens, no matter how unrelated the events themselves seem._

_**That**__'s what I'm trying to make work, and why my chapters all start with 'Sweet mother of God please don't kill me'; because even I'm not sure I can make this work. I really hope my writing skills and Jennifer's character and the amount of work I've put into this will carry this story through the conceptual absurdity that the culmination of the cliché entails. If they don't… well, we'll know my limitations. _

_I do promise you, whether you like it or you don't, whether I manage it or I don't, that there __**is**__ clarity coming._

_Triple-Edit: Speaking of clichés- this chapter contains a short, semi-lucid R.E.M. dream sequence. Now, I don't know how many of you have nice, concise, detailed dreams like most of the ones I see written around here, but I really don't. I attempted to write it to reflect how I've experienced dreaming- stream of consciousness, indistinct moments that blend into each other without warning- but obviously that's somewhat… difficult. If you find that part confusing, __**this**__ is why. _

_Experimental impulses, yay! (Sorry, guys.)_

_Quadruple-Edit: I have had it revealed to me why I've had so much trouble writing the chapters following Chapter Ten- I don't know how to match it. I constantly feel like these chapters are utter shit, mean nothing, do nothing, hold no one's interest, and are just filler between plot spikes, despite knowing that they're full of necessary build-up. _

_That and they're combined with my fear that no one will accept the next plot step._

_Help me; I'm having a writer's crisis. Jesus. Hopefully I'll be fine once I reach that particular hurdle._

_Oof. So. I'm not totally happy with this chapter, but it's progress. Power through it, right?_

_**Synopsis:**__Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh, but I'm the bastard who keeps you waiting for months on end for the next update. Sorry, guys!_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Fourteen_

Seto Kaiba had experienced pain beyond comprehension.

"-exacerbating the patient's condition! Your _actions_-"

Seto Kaiba had deflected bullets, jumped from windows, and climbed down cliff-faces.

"-induce a comatose state! Do you have_ any_ idea how close-"

Seto Kaiba had never been so discomfited.

"-beyond simple _irresponsibility_. Her symptoms were and _are _far too-"

_Never_.

The doctor was too livid for intimidation; far past the point of fear.

He was a little man with a wide, expressive mouth, liver spots on both hands and balding pate, thin wisps of hair the colour of sun-bleached asphalt.

On a normal day, Doctor Hiro Adachi was an old, unimpressive man with a warm and amiable countenance.

At the moment, his broad, sagging cheeks were stiff with disapproval; his mouth moved sharply, imparting grim, angry snaps of sound.

For once, Kaiba didn't have the option of snapping back. Adachi had kept his brother in good health for far too long; replacing him now would be… problematic.

He knew that Adachi knew this. Normally, the older man minced around the older Kaiba's sometimes volatile temper with some degree of delicacy.

It appeared that Jennifer's condition was not one requiring delicacy.

"_Mister Kaiba_," Adachi scowled. Kaiba noted that his voice was distressingly hoarse when raised and wondered idly if it was a feature of his age or the time invested in his tirade. "I would recommend that you attend more closely; should your… _companion_ continue to endure prologue periods of such pronounced physical exhaustion, she risks serious harm to her person. _Please_ inform me why _you_ could not procure medical attention for her." He paused; glowered at him through one glittering, deep-set dark eye. "I do not believe that I could be adequately convinced of your failing to recognize anything abnormal in her behaviour or countenance, _Mister Kaiba_," he said coldly.

_Mister_ Kaiba had not, in fact, recognized any abnormal behaviour.

Jennifer's behaviour was never strictly _normal_.

He _did_, however, recognize several things about Doctor Adachi's behaviour.

The first was his pointed use of the word _companion_. Kaiba guessed that he'd been informed of Jennifer's dubious marital status and disapproved.

The second was his snarling emphasis on _you_. Kaiba, with a more pronounced feeling of insult, recognized that Doctor Adachi considered his not inconsiderable wealth a worthy foil to any commonplace excuse.

The third was his comment about abnormal behaviour.

All he recognized about that was that it made him laugh.

Aloud.

Adachi did not look impressed.

"_Mister Kaiba_-"

"Doctor Adachi," he interrupted drily, "if you had, at any point, encountered my _companion_-" a little counter-emphasis, just for the sake of posterity- "in a so-called _normal _state, you would have also recognized that she does not usually exhibit…" he paused, eying the older man. "…distinctive signs of _normality_."

Adachi was still visibly upset, but his anger had given way to a wary look of unsettlement. "_Mister Kaiba_, I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate-"

It was then that Jennifer started to scream.

It was a hoarse, unearthly sound; the stiff, half-strangled declaration of someone screaming through teeth clenched painfully tight.

He lunged.

The first thing he saw was the white of her eyes.

Adachi pushed past him.

The other doctor, one woefully unfamiliar psychologist by the name of Daisuke Kashiwagi, was trying in vain to keep her flailing limbs from making sweeping passes, seemingly without direction. He didn't have to ask for assistance; Adachi scrambled forward without prompting.

Fuelled by helplessness, confusion and fear, something in the young brunette's temper broke.

"What did you _do?_" he roared. Kashiwagi, taller, thinner, and more excitable, jumped back in surprise.

She'd stopped screaming.

Her body was still twisting on the bed; her hands clawed forward and back, fingers hooking, wrists turning in Adachi's grip; her eyes were still open.

She wasn't looking anywhere.

She wasn't even blinking.

He sagged against the doorframe, understandably disturbed.

Adachi was shooting questions at the still aimless Kashiwagi.

"You couldn't wake her?"

The younger man- perhaps only thirty-five or forty- made a vague grab for the girl's thrashing leg. "No," he said uncertainly. "Is it, perhaps-"

Adachi slapped Jennifer's face lightly. There was no clear response- her eyes twitched vaguely. Her head turned and then turned away. He frowned.

Kashiwagi was rooting through his medical bag. Adachi snarled something incomprehensible at him. "No sedatives," he growled, fighting her twisting movements. "You'll see- in a moment, it'll be over-"

Her thrashing spasms continued for what seemed like an eternity- in the brief snatches of silence, moments bereft of the soft, quick _sht-sht-sht_ of her trashing body twisting against the bedsheets, the grinding of Jennifer's teeth seemed so immediate, so loud and grating, that his jaw ached to hear it.

"Soon," Adachi gritted again, sweat running down his broad face, "it'll be over soon-"

And, abruptly, it was.

Her clawing fingers went limp.

Kaiba lurched forward, alarmed. Adachi raised a placating hand.

"Has _Mrs._ Nakamura been under any considerable stress recently?" he quizzed, not bothering to turn.

Kaiba settled back against the doorframe begrudgingly. "I don't know. Maybe."

"Maybe?"

He snorted. It sounded bitter- harsher to his ears than he'd intended it to. "I wouldn't know. She's not very… obliging."

A sceptical look. Adachi's broad fingers were pressed into the side of Jennifer's throat, almost disappearing into the shadow thrown by her head.

He shrugged. "She's very private."

An old man's raised eyebrow. "Even with _you._"

He couldn't contain a bitter laugh.

"_Especially_ with me."

Kashiwagi was examining the unconscious girl anxiously but distantly, almost as though he feared touching her would trigger another outburst. Adachi tossed him a look of visible contempt before turning back towards the young billionaire. His heavy cheeks were pulled even further down with concern and disapproval.

"_Mister_ Kaiba, are you familiar at all with parasomnia disorders? Specifically instances of- and please, forgive the colloquial term- 'night terrors'_?_"

He stared uncomprehendingly.

Adachi sighed and rearranged his patient, hoisting her further up onto her pillow. Her breathing barely hitched.

"It's an unusual disorder to see an adult; usually triggered by traumatic stress. It has been known to occur occasionally in war veterans," he commented. Kaiba didn't miss his shrewd, scrutinizing look. "The sudden onset and departure of symptoms, extremely elevated heart rate, trancelike state- it's all consistent. Typical, even." He examined her eyes, pulling back the lids carefully. Jennifer shifted and moaned. "To be manifesting at such a late age, however, is highly unusual," he commented. He pushed back her upper lip with a thumb.

His sharp utterance of shock called Kashiwagi like a dog whistle.

Kashiwagi looked; made a similar noise of realization. The two settled into only half-audible muttering.

The few minutes he spent watching their faces turn confidentially together, a balding, spotted pate tilted towards a full head of slowing grey hair, brief flashes of time-weathered and sun-worn skin- minutes spent watching them part with a burst of speculative mumbles - minutes spent watching Adachi run his fingers along Jennifer's jaw, prodding and poking and massaging the broad points of under her ears, thumb pushing against her gums, running along her worn teeth-

He felt his already stretched and twisted patience shiver with the expectation of breaking.

He made a rather rude sound of inquisition. Kashiwagi looked up, startled. Adachi looked back briefly, dismissive.

Kaiba looked at him expectantly.

The old man sighed, audibly impatient.

"This woman is a _bruxer_," he said gruffly.

Kaiba, in somewhat impolite terms, requested that he speak more clearly.

Beneath their fat, sagging lids, Adachi's deep-set eyes glittered. Kaiba saw that he was observing him carefully, still only half-turned away from his patient.

"_Bruxism_ is a medical term for chronic teeth grinding or clenching." His tone was rather short.

Kaiba made a little noise of acknowledgement. "They're all capped," he contributed, faintly relieved by the ability to do so; his own helplessness was wearing on him.

Kashiwagi protested.

"How could you possibly know that?" he asked, visibly nettled. "That's highly unlikely- That would require an exceptional amount of wear-"

"He's right," Adachi interrupted. "The patient's been grinding her teeth for as long as she's had them. They're all capped. She clenches, too- Look. She's split one. Bottom left premolar."

Kashiwagi looked; recoiled. Kaiba noticed, with a twinge of disgust, a faint greening of his countenance.

Adachi sighed, corrected the twisted bedsheets, and straightened. His frown was troubled. Kaiba didn't like that.

"I need you to cooperate with me," the old doctor told him frankly. His hoarse, whispery voice seemed an appropriately sinister commentary to the disturbing scene he'd just witnessed. "How long have these episodes been occurring?"

It was almost physically painful for him to admit that he didn't know.

The doctor eyed him sceptically.

"_Mister Kaiba_, these episodes typically occur within stage four sleep-"

"She doesn't sleep."

Adachi just stared at him. He stared back, feeling increasingly irritable.

"It's not my doing. She just doesn't sleep. She either sedates herself or she doesn't sleep. All she'll tell me is that she has nightmares and wakes up in pain." He glowered irritably at the room in general. Mostly at the girl in question. "She doesn't sleep."

Adachi's face was alarmingly drawn.

"Barbiturates or benzodiazepines?" he demanded.

Kaiba tried to remember what she'd called it.

Bloodless and tight, the old man's look of horror told him what he needed to know before the man did himself.

"Those were removed from distribution in the sixties," he said, his hand floating absently towards her, almost as though it thought it could somehow disprove this apparently shocking discovery. "Unregulated self-medication? With illegal- highly _addictive_- barbituates?" he repeated, visibly aghast. "Long_, intentionally perpetuated _periods of insomnia?"

Adachi sagged down on the bed. "It's a miracle she hasn't killed herself," he muttered.

Kaiba told him about her convulsions.

The old doctor looked as though he was considering rescinding his demand for medical closure.

Kashiwagi made a grim sound of discovery. Adachi's head quirked listlessly towards him.

The lean psychologist was pinching the writhing shape of one of her sculptures between his finger and thumb. The desk behind him was littered with them.

"Hiro," he said stiffly, "I don't mean to alarm you, but I believe this woman's condition might be chronic."

Hiro Adachi looked at the figure in his partner's fingers.

The old man ran a hand down his face.

Soft, whispery, sinister; fallen leaves under a light foot. Rustling grass.

"_Mister_ Kaiba, are you familiar with Howard Lovecraft?"

_(No Evidence Available)_

Doctor Adachi kept breaking from the conversation to frown distantly into his coffee. Seto Kaiba couldn't blame him.

The young billionaire was, of course, familiar with the story and concepts of _The Night Gaunts_. He had done extensive research on H. P. Lovecraft's works during the construction of _Helheim_. He had not, however, been aware that the illustrious author's disturbing repertoire had been dubiously based in a childhood condition.

Regardless, he disagreed with the correlation; if anything, the prospect of Jennifer summoning up and giving life to the host of horrific images she saw in her nightmarish episodes seemed more like to _Pickman's Model _than any of Lovecraft's other tales of horror.

'_She doesn't paint,'_ he thought irrelevantly.

Adachi was still staring into his coffee.

Daisuke Kashiwagi, however, couldn't seem to talk fast enough. "Instances of this are unusual, but certainly not unheard of; whether genetic or trauma-related- and it could, feasibly, be both, if she's been manifesting symptoms for this long- parasomnia disorders are very common, very common indeed- It's only the manifestation of 'night terrors' in an adult- the possibility that she's aware and recalls her moments of paralytic fear- it's certainly not _unheard_ of, but it's decidedly unusual- even in _Mister_ Lovecraft's case, his episodes and resultant recollections are purported to have ceased during the onset of puberty- for her to still be experiencing episodes this late in her life-"

Adachi interrupted him, old, heavy eyes still absently downcast. "She's been exacerbating her condition," he muttered. "Both sleep deprivation and malnutrition are proven to worsen parasomniac behaviours. Unaware of that, no doubt, she believed- _believes_, she must believe it currently- her illness to be untreatable, and began and now maintains a series of unintentionally self-destructive behaviours." He paused, cupping his forehead with a look that hovered between pity, disbelief, and distant unhappiness. "And, on noticing her worsening condition, she reinforced those destructive behaviours, believing that they allowed her some degree of release from her symptoms; in turn, her barbiturate abuse negatively affected her overall nutrition, which, in turn, exacerbated her insomnia-" The low _tap_ of a full mug settling on the kitchen counter- "which, in turn, exacerbated her _bruxism _and increased the frequency and duration of her parasomniac episodes."

Adachi suddenly looked very old, his broad, heavy face rippled with the sagging folds of age and the creases of emotional strain, more like the face of a gargoyle than that of an old man.

"_Mister Kaiba_," he said slowly. A careful note hung in it like the _'but' _of anincoming ultimatum. "If I am to put faith in the account of behaviours you've provided, _Mrs_. Nakamura's recent change of condition- you said she was previously _unable_ to sleep, maintaining long periods of wakefulness until forced into unconsciousness by exhaustion?- her recent change in condition may be related to her improved nutrition." Adachi was looking at him with dark, hooded eyes. "Severely underweight individuals frequently suffer from instances of insomnia, some of them quite severe. There is a fairly distinct possibility that, if her sedative use and nutrition are corrected, and an enforced sleep schedule put into effect, the worst of her symptoms may disappear completely." He frowned. "I must also strongly recommend psychological evaluation. If her behaviours have been ongoing-"

Kaiba uttered a sharp bark of laughter. Adachi sent him a look of resurfacing anger. The young brunette gestured lightly- it wasn't quite apologetic, but it was close.

"Doctor Adachi," he said drily, "if you can somehow convince her to see a psychologist, I will cover all expenses unconditionally." His own mug was woefully empty.

'_-the worst of her symptoms may disappear completely-' _

He reached for the coffee pot again, feeling uncharacteristically shaken.

Both doctors were regarding him with something like caution. He poured the coffee leisurely, calming himself, enjoying the fresh heat as it filtered through the ceramic.

He looked back at them, feeling the amusement surface on his face. "She won't go."

Kashiwagi's greying eyebrows knitted together in confusion. "Surely the patient can be made to see the potential benefits to her condition-"

Kaiba shook his head sharply. "She won't go," he repeated. "Everything I know about Jennifer Nauswell-" he caught Adachi's sharp look and amended his statement wryly- "Everything I know about Jennifer _Nakamura_ I had to coerce out of her. She's extremely private. Given to rambling under pressure, yes, but absolutely closed-mouth about certain subjects. Under no circumstances will she willingly speak with a psychologist," he said. He could see the disapproval hidden politely below the old doctor's expression, knew that he was expected to answer in kind- the absurdity of the concept was too much for him to maintain a polite facade. He couldn't do it.

An old man's sceptical consideration. "Well, it can do no harm to ask her when she wakes. She may prove more obliging than you've considered, considering her collapse. There may also be aspects of her condition that we are, as of yet, unaware of. It's unfortunate that we don't have access to her medical history; I'm afraid we'll have to rely on exactly how private she is or is not in our evaluation of her, _Mister Kaiba._"

Kaiba brooded. Improving on her diet and restricting her access to pharmaceuticals were things he had already endeavoured to do; Adachi's testimony was a medical defence of his previous attempts, but he doubted that would sway her willingness to comply. The last time he'd attempted something similar to an enforced sleep schedule, she'd torn holes in his wall.

A thought struck him.

He asked.

Adachi looked startled. "Well, yes, somnambulism- otherwise known as _sleep-walking_, but the term is somewhat inaccurate- somnambulism is also a parasomnia disorder also occurring in stage four sleep, and a 'night terror' sufferer tends to be highly active during an episode, so it isn't impossible. Unconscious destructive behaviour would certainly be consistent with the severity of her symptoms. As for the extent of the damage, the parasomniac in the grip of a 'terror' is not subject to the same unconscious moderation of force as a person operating normally." He paused contemplatively. "Despite her small size and low muscle mass, it _is_ feasible. The phenomena you seem to be referring to is generally called 'hysterical strength'; most often, instances occur when a person perceives sudden, extreme danger and acts instinctively. Situations such as a new mother lifting a car in an effort to save her newborn have been documented, but not well. Given that the phenomenon, by its very nature, occurs very suddenly and for only a short period of time, existing research on it is largely inconclusive. What you're describing- it's not impossible, but it's not verifiable, either."

Adachi said something that made Kaiba look down into the reflective black surface in his cup.

_'Inconclusive; not impossible, but not verifiable. Not enough information for proof or disproof.'_

If there had ever been an uncomfortably accurate descriptor of his relationship with Jennifer, it was that.

He frowned.

Adachi's words filtered through his mind again.

_ "Ultimately, there's no evidence available."_

_(No Evidence Available)_

Very distantly, Jennifer knew that she was dreaming.

It was an awareness that made her angry for reasons she couldn't quite grasp; there was only a tenuous _knowing_, and thoughts that slithered through her fingers, thoughts that were so many greyed, ugly, slimy, strangely delicate things, so easily broken, so easily dropped.

She'd try to grasp one, to hold it to her, and, feeling it slithering between her fingers, she'd pinch it- it would split, and half was gone, somewhere on the ground, and she'd look down compulsively- and she'd feel it slither, feel it dripping off of the edge of her palm, and as she lost the other half of that slimy little thought, all she'd have was

_'please don't, Ceri'_

And the_ knowing_ of the dreaming and _not-knowing_ in the dreaming would make her angry and the _not-knowing_ of the anger would frustrate her, make her even angrier, make her think of- _be of_- indistinct flashes of hall cupboard floorboards and her mother sobbing in the kitchen- sobbing through the phone

_'you __**ruined**__ me- I could have been happy, and you ruined __**everything-**__ you always ruin everything, Jennifer- you ruined__** everything-**__'_

Guilt.

'_No, please don't, Mom- don't hang up-'_

She hated the feelings; there were always feelings-

_'don't say that- you don't mean that-'_

Frustration. Stubborn, tight-fisted pride.

'_not going back-doesn't have to be- don't have to play this game-'_

Horror.

'_not lipstick'_

And-

_Pain._

_ 'I'm so sorry.'_

There was always _pain._

'_S'il vous plaît croyez-moi._ _Je n'ai jamais voulu savoir. Je voudrais ne sais pas.' _

Pain and guilt.

_'Je suis désolé de je t'aime encore.'_

Pain and guilt and brown hair and wicked little smiles and _coffee-_

_ 'Fi angen i encilio. Gadewch i mi ei ben ei hun.'_

But mostly just _pain_.

_'please don't ask me'_

Watching Toshio sleep. Slats of light from the blinds like stripes on an unstriped comforter.

_Envy._

Dark head of hair; sometimes deceptive. Deceptive and disappointing.

_Guilt_.

_'no reason to be disappointed'_

Whole nights spent watching Toshio sleep. Nights without drugs. _Jonesing_ nights.

_His_ nights.

_'__**no**__'_

Solidity in the drift.

A half-whorled knot under lacquer at the end of a long table with shiny black vinyl chairs, too shiny not to look cheap but shiny enough to look new

_'please, not here'_

He was looking at her and he was bony fingers and bright blue eyes and _'impossible symmetry' _in a moment of strange clarity but it was gone and he was wearing a _red suit and sitting at that fucking table_

_ 'all wrong; you've got it backwards again'_

But it wasn't backwards, sitting in a shiny black chair

_guilt hate horror pains-_

_ 'please don't remind me'_

And she was wearing a red suit too.

_(No Evidence Available)_

Sleep, blackened with residual mascara, was crusted into the corners of her eyes.

"Hold still," he muttered, reaching for it- _for her_- to clear it away.

She mewled and smacked at him. He glowered back.

Jennifer's exhaustion had only bought her a few hours of uninterrupted sleep; now, torn between insomnia and obvious fatigue, she was drifting between them.

She was irritable. He understood that. It didn't make it any easier to deal with.

Her skin was still clammy, her face still flushed; though Doctor Adachi had contentedly declared her out of any significant danger- she'd been running hot, slightly feverish- she was still sick.

He didn't like that.

She didn't like him touching her.

He didn't like that, either.

Seto Kaiba was not a man who liked to talk about problems. He was a man who _fixed_ problems. He was a man who liked fixing problems. Discussion was arbitrary; action, rewarding. With Jennifer safely out of suspicion and another piece of her twisted little riddle wrested from her clammy fingers, he found the comfort of control returned to him.

Control meant not having to brood over missing links and potential repercussions. Control meant not having to tread lightly. Control meant not having to worry about watching her evaporate again, not having to resign himself to the position of _abandoned without cause_.

She was not a willing participant in his control over her.

He knew this.

He did not care, particularly.

If he'd been feeling more inclined to philosophizing, he may have found himself justifying his actions by comparing them to hers; control only exerted in amounts equivalent to the resistance it encountered. Reasonable force, reapplied.

He was not, however, feeling inclined to philosophizing, nor self-justification.

He struggled with her.

"Oh, for the love of- just _hold still_, Jennifer."

She kicked him; wriggled under the covers, cocooning herself like a metamorphosing caterpillar.

_'The only thing she's going to turn into is a troglodyte,'_ he thought uncharitably, yanking the covers off of her.

She half-looked at him, fetal and squinting balefully. She looked tiny, all projecting elbows and bony knees, swaddled in one of Mokuba's old shirts and a pair of boxers; he resisted a wry smile at the sight.

_'I never thought I'd have to get __**you**__ out of bed.'_

Dry but ultimately present, the smile found its way to his face.

She made a face at him. "What're you smiling at?" Her voice was croaking, husky from either sleep or sickness; possibly both.

Wryness pulling at the corners of his mouth. "None of your business."

Jennifer looked definitively unimpressed. She muttered something that could've been "S'too bright"and reached for the covers. He threw them in the corner and crossed his arms.

He watched her consider retaliating; saw the logic compete with irritation behind those sleep-narrowed eyes; watched her click and whirr and mull over the question _"Is it worth it?"_

She made another face and curled a pillow into herself.

He yanked the pillow from between her knees.

She kicked at him and missed.

He crossed his arms and looked at her.

Click. Whirr. Unpleasant scowl, squinty, bleary eyes, hair sticking up in luminous tufts, left cheek imprinted by wrinkled fabric.

She curled into herself.

He hoisted her off of the bed.

She flattened her palm against his face.

"F'off," she muttered, squirming and rolling like a rather skinny and languid crocodile.

"Like it or not, you're going to _eat_," he snarled at her, trying to adjust his hold; she wouldn't stop _squirming_. As she wriggled under his arm, worming around his side towards the bed _'-confounded squirming-'_

He had a sudden, brilliant flash of memory.

He felt her note his change in posture. She paused briefly, looking up at him with a narrow expression made alert by wariness.

He looked imperiously down at her.

She suddenly looked nervous.

_'Just how much __**do**__ you see, Nauswell?'_ he wondered, keeping his gaze level.

She looked _very_ nervous.

"Whatever it is, I didn't do it," she mumbled.

He hoisted her up again.

Upside down.

She yowled unhappily and scrabbled at the arm around her waist. "What did I do?"

Her legs were pistoning wildly; he had to jerk his head back, narrowly avoiding flailing foot. She let loose an unhappy little _'oof'_ with every step. Her fingernails were scraping against his forearms.

"I thought you _didn't_," he objected cheerfully, eying the staircase critically; whatever his cruel intent, he didn't actually want her to crack her foolish skull open on the marble._ 'Getting down there like this might pose some difficulties.'_

She was still thrashing. "I don't know what you're accusing me of!" she protested. Her voice came out in a breathless little gasp.

"I didn't accuse you of anything," he denied.

"You did! You _are!_ What did I do?"

He laughed. "It seems you've more idea than I do; what _did_ you do?" He adjusted her again and started carefully down the stairs. She made a startled little sound of budding terror. "Don't move around so much. You might hurt yourself."

She wailed.

A very confused-looking Mokuba was in the midst of taking off his shoes.

He opened his mouth- closed it- made a puzzled noise like air escaping from a balloon.

Jennifer's arms shot out, reaching anxiously for him across the room. _"Heeeelp meeee,"_ she wailed.

His brother's eyes looked at her, flickered up to him, and then sent her a pitying look. "You're on your own for this one, Jen," he said apologetically.

More thrashing; readjustment; a resulting shriek. _"But I don't know_ _what I did!_"

Mokuba shrugged helplessly, watching them.

He reached the landing with a grunt of satisfaction.

Doctor Adachi's low noise of horror was audible even over Jennifer's whining.

He surged forward with a cry. "What are you_ doing? _The patient's health-"

Kaiba looked at him dispassionately, adjusting the girl in his arms as she paused, craning her head to look up at the stranger. She spoke before he could.

"Who the fuck are you?"

Adachi paused, looking down at her with visible astonishment. Kaiba snorted and peered down between her momentarily still knees.

She looked up at him with a head-rush-red face and a quizzical expression. "Who the fuck is he?" she asked again.

"Doctor Hiro Adachi," the brunet supplied, shifting both legs to one shoulder. "You collapsed."

She leered up at him. It was less effective given the angle. "So sweet; you care."

He frowned.

"I will drop you on your head."

Mokuba laughed.

Adachi looked baffled.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He'd expected this.

The muscles in her thin shoulders were hard wires under skin; tense, unforgiving.

_"I refuse."_

Adachi looked on silently. His gaze shifted from her to her dubious caretaker to her dubious caretaker's brother. Kaiba looked back. Mokuba just shrugged indifferently.

Kashiwagi hadn't gotten the point.

She cut him off before he had a chance to get further than _"long-standing effects of potential psychological trauma-"_

_ "__**No**__."_

It was a snarl.

Kaiba recognized it, the hard, aggressive stance, and the gritted teeth; he pulled her back into her chair, twisting his fingers into the collar of her shirt. "It was a suggestion," he cut in sharply. "You can be in no way compelled to seek psychiatric evaluation without your express consent."

She relaxed, but only slightly, and sent him a suspicious, petulant look before slapping his hand away.

Adachi looked older than ever. As he ran a heavy hand down his face, the skin seemed only loosely connected to the bone below. "We can, in no way, convince you to reconsider?"

Her mouth was making the tight movements of an on-coming tirade when his cellphone rang.

He flipped it open without pausing, and was grateful to see her face turn inquisitively towards him out of the corner of his eye. Distracted Jennifer was always good.

"Kaiba," he answered crisply.

Kimura's voice wasn't a welcome addition to his afternoon.

_"There's been an incident at the company, sir."_

He frowned tersely. Across the table, the doctors exchanged wary glances. Mokuba was leaning in close beside him, trying to hear. Kaiba shot him a stern look.

"In the development lab? Why didn't Tokigawa-"

The air swam.

_"No, sir. In your office."_

_(No Evidence Available.)_


	15. Chapter 15

_**Note:**__ Yet again, this is going to be a __**super-long author's note**__._

_**So: **__This is officially my most-chaptered story. _

_It was already my longest story. __**NEA**__ is pushing 80K; unless this chapter turns out to be 611 words long, including this note, __**NEA **__is breaking that landmark. Think about that. I've made it abundantly clear that there's still a climax to come, and- I won't give you another __**YSS!**__ ending, I swear to god- an eventual conclusion._

_**No Evidence Available**__ is going to break the 100K mark. I never seriously thought it would happen. With __**YSS! **__leading the casket, I have written the equivalent of a full-length book about Jennifer Nauswell._

_Holy shit._

_Speaking of Jennifer, I'm glad you're all comfortable with the __**Everything is Jennifer**__ trope. Also, __**lampshading**__: "Jenniferitis Universalis__,__characterized by finding her everywhere with no explanation as to__why__.__"_

_On to more sensible things: so many reviews! Thanks, guys! I feel so loved. Glad to see everybody appreciates my ludicrously over-the-top research and reapplication methods. Many apologies to both __**PetraPan **__and __**Kay W. Grim**__ for the cliffhangers, but… I probably shouldn't apologize because I'm just going to keep doing that forever. Well, not forever. Probably not in the final chapter. Maybe. Possibly. _

_There's an infinitesimal chance I won't._

_**Guptanation**__, glad to see you're enjoying it- I didn't lay it out as well as I'd meant to, at first, so now I'm forced to writhe around in endless loops trying to hook all of the stray threads back in; there is nothing I hate as much as loose ends. Hopefully your review indicates that I'm succeeding! (Fixing the railcar so we can all go to hell in it. So productive.)_

_**Flawless Masquerade**__, I'm sorry I've hindered your ability to do your homework, but __**NEA**__ regularly affects my ability to do mine, so we're both victims to the same habit, unfortunately. But… I'm not ready to quit quite yet. Jonesin' nights come later; for now, update __**The Nature of Love**__, woman! (Um, ah- and man! God, your being a couple really screws me up in the nouns and pronouns sense.)_

_**WandererRaen**__, you didn't think I'd forgotten you, did you? How could I? Speaking of throwing readers for a loop: one of the things about __**Dolls and Despots**__ is that neither Lucie nor Jordan is inherently connected to anything. __**Anything**__. They're literally just… around. Anything they get themselves into is their own doing. (Here's a hint: Oxymoron Jordan gets herself into plenty of trouble without fate playing any hands at all.)_

_Yeah, I can be unintentionally repetitive sometimes, a la "She wailed/He wailed." I guess that's just how it goes, however hard I try! As long as it doesn't distract you. I'm glad you like the dream sequence; dreams are just one of those things for me. I've never understood the way dreams are written- daydreams can be clean and concise, for sure, but dreams are never that realistic. Never that grounded. You wake up and things that made perfect sense at the time reveal themselves to be utterly bizarre. Dreams are lazily firing synapses and current preoccupations stewing together in your unconscious mind. The result is never going to be neat and staid, particularly not if you're a drug-addled insomniac with pending psychological trauma._

_And intense is what I do. I enjoy intense. Most of my stories, this one included, build themselves around at least one incredibly intense scene. But don't worry: You most certainly do not know exactly what's going to happen. I guarantee it._

_Aaand this is how long I'm going to keep you waiting! (Durf-da-hurf. The joke is that you're reading this because it's been posted. Someone shoot me.)_

_Edit: __**Kheradihr**__! I missed you. Yes, as usual: plot twists. Always, always plot twists._

_Always._

_**InkosDelirium**__: Thank you for your lovely review! I can't honestly communicate how flattered I am that you and so many others are so taken with my writing style. I always endeavour to improve, and feedback like this is so valuable to me- to me, rawness, as it were, is essential. I've never been a proponent of giving readers a few pages to decide whether they want to continue; I've always believed that the narrative should reach out and grab the reader by the throat. The classic example: 'I know something terrible is about to happen, but I just can't look away.' _

_That might, just maaaybe, be the source of all the trainwreck jokes I make, haha. So let me know- because I always want to know- my lovely reviewers: _

_**Can you look away?**_

_Oh, hey, it's relevant to note that this note is long enough that, by itself, it has now pushed __**NEA **__over the 80K mark. _

_Ramblacious celebration, guys! _

_And just one last note, for all of my lovely reviewers: I just want you to know that I love it when you write me long reviews. Never worry about sounding stupid or unnecessary. Honestly: I mean it. Ideally, I'd get my stories back with notes scribbled in the margins and sentences crossed out and messy exclamations points beside paragraphs and underlined lines and big red 'x's- there is never anything you can say that is not useful to me. I always want to know. I know it's a lot to ask, but for those of you who have the time, I always appreciate it. _

_**Also:**__ I'm probably going to finish this before I continue __**Dolls and Despots**__, because writing two stories at once is seriously screwing me up. Brief hiatus for that, then! But don't worry; if I can get myself rolling properly again, it shouldn't be long until this is finished._

_**Does it terrify you to realize that there are only going to be three or four more chapters?**_

_**Synopsis:**__Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh, and oh god please don't kill me_

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Fifteen_

_Incident_.

The word was laughable. _Incidental_, as it were.

There was nothing incidental about this.

His office was in ruins.

Seto Kaiba stepped forward, dreamily detached, distantly hearing broken glass crunch and snarl beneath his shoes.

His desk had been gutted; wood chips littered the glass-strewn floor like landmarks. His papers were everywhere- his computer, thrown into the corner, still humming and whirring resiliently where it lay, haphazardly propped against a half-emptied bookshelf.

The door to his personal immersion console had been forced inwards- tough enough to withstand the force, but delicate enough to have bent and cracked, spiderweb lines of distress were crawling outwards along the fibreglass.

The picture window was intact, which struck him as absurd and wrong.

He stared, assessing the damage blankly.

Kimura cleared his throat behind him. He turned, almost uncomprehending.

The older man was looking at him with an expression not unlike pity.

"There are no signs of forced entry, sir," Kimura told him crisply. "Whoever did this came in with an access card, and the surveillance for half of the building was disabled for maintenance; once investigated, both the invoice and the employee number presented to reception were falsified. The police have already swept the premises. We're told to expect an update shortly."

He looked at the carnage again, looked back at Kimura and his escort. "Yuuna?" he asked. The world was remarkably vague. "My secretary."

Kimura inclined his head respectfully. "Out to lunch when it happened. Your calls were being forwarded to Human Resources."

Kaiba looked at the glass on the ground.

"Get this catalogued and then have it cleaned up." He paused, staring through the stoic older man's left arm and past the young guard beside him. "Double security around the premises and… take note of any unusual behaviour among the staff. _Any_."

He looked at his computer, gasping and wheezing in the corner, and ran a hand down his face.

"And, for the love of God, somebody get me some coffee."

_(No Evidence Available)_

Jennifer knew something; that or she thought she knew something.

She wasn't telling what.

Like a child, her attempts at secrecy were always translucent; he'd seen it. Seen it in the way her eyes had flickered across his office- fixed on his desk- fixed on the immersion pod.

On the window.

He'd watched her expression rearrange itself impossibly, rippling, one moment tight with distress- the next, totally flat, darkly speculative, patently angry.

None of that had been ambiguous.

But in those rippling expressions, he saw something he wasn't accustomed to seeing.

Fear.

Not unsettlement, nervousness or unease. Not even the hysterical _don't push me, please_ terror that pulsed through her face when he started to dig at her.

Raw fear. Animal fear. Instinctual fear. Visceral, human fear, irrevocably married to anger. The fear of the mouse as it stepped on the mousetrap, glittering black eyes and all.

She _knew _something.

She knew that he saw her _knowing_ it.

But, as always, the _what_ was the question unanswered. She was childlike, yes- but of all children, she was the stubborn child whose tantrums consisted of holding her breath until she passed out.

She wasn't talking, and he couldn't make her talk.

Instead, she was side-stepping, criss-crossing, saying a thousand things and nothing at all.

Presenting ideas that were patently ridiculously.

Presenting ideas that were plausible but had already been presented.

Presenting everything all at once, muttering and rambling and sputtering in such a way that he wasn't even sure if he could consider process of elimination a viable prospect for uncovering what she knew.

She may have included the truth, or part of the truth, in her jumble of half-hearted lies and suppositions, and there was no telling if she had or hadn't.

Whether she was silent or speaking, she said nothing.

But she _knew_ something, and he intended to know what.

So, as with everything, he was going about it methodically.

She'd shown up to the office on her own, despite the protests of the doctors- both of whom were now tailing her, waiting anxiously outside of rooms they weren't cleared to enter, lingering nervously in the company of security members, murmuring disapprovingly to each other about the effects of over-exertion.

It had been his decision to include her in the investigation.

He had made that decision entirely on the basis of her obvious reluctance to be included in the investigation.

He'd taken her to the surveillance room again. He'd explained the planned nature of the break-in. She'd reluctantly speculated that the perpetrators had received inside information from the security member they presumed was involved.

He'd taken that as a prompt and shown her the tapes of Nakamura's confession. She'd watched with remarkable stoicism until the figure on the tapes had pleaded to see her.

Her face had convulsed with guilt. She'd said nothing.

Instead, she'd shrugged and pointed out that all her soon-to-be ex-husband's confession had confirmed was Minoru Ueda's involvement. Relentless prodding had only provoked a sulky admission that Nakamura's small catalogue of stolen company items hadn't included Ueda's missing service revolver.

It was then that he'd looked at her and realized something.

He wasn't defeated yet.

Jennifer had soft spots. He had a trump card.

Mokuba had agreed to join the investigation with surprising eagerness; Kaiba couldn't deny that he was pleased to find him so willing. It had been far too long.

She hadn't caved, but she was starting to look miserable.

He'd formed a proper circus of wonders around her; coworkers, security members, doctors, admirers, ex-lovers, pictures of ex-lovers-

She hated the attention. The _crush_. He'd taken for granted her ability to handle the limelight, too used to it himself and too easily misled by the media hype that seemed to now pervade her presence, following behind her, a wake of whispers and gasps.

He'd forgotten.

Jennifer wasn't good at_ people_.

Jennifer didn't do the _people_ thing.

That was his forte.

He did it well.

As it happened, she'd accidentally collected a mess of _people_ in the short time she'd been back.

The development team. The programmers. The security team. The Public Relations department- almost in its entirety.

His brother.

The doctors.

He gave her to them under the sensible reasoning that someone needed to fish out the possibility of an inside source, and, of course, who would Seto Kaiba trust more than his very own legendary Jennifer Nauswell?

She was his trusted employee.

She was universally assumed to be his lover.

She had no plausible reason to deny his request.

She'd had no choice but to comply.

But she still wasn't talking. She hadn't slipped up yet. He knew.

He'd been watching her carefully as she interviewed curious employee after curious employee, some bolder than the others, all more eager to ask questions than answer them. Mokuba lingered eagerly at her side, eager but all too easily distracted.

He, employer and sometime lover, sitting carefully _away_, observing impassively.

The looks she shot the one-way mirror gave Kaiba the distinct impression that she wanted to kill him.

He hoped she cracked before she tried.

He knew the strength in those skinny hands.

A quiet question, barely audible.

"So, um, are you and Kaiba-sama…?"

Another bold one. He hid a smirk as she dug her nails into her leg. She'd stopped trying to force a smile; she responded with a sullen look.

"I'm afraid that's not the subject of this interview," she snapped impatiently. He saw her grinding her teeth; watched her pull in a deep breath and let it out.

Watched Mokuba shift uncomfortably and grin, just a mite more crookedly than before.

Watched Jennifer throw a dirty look at the mirrored glass he and Kimura lingered behind.

Smiled to himself. Felt faintly guilty for pushing her this way. Pushed aside guilt with thoughts of necessity.

He saw Jennifer's shoulders sag as she turned back to the interviewee.

He assumed her posture meant that she'd finally grasped the inescapable nature of her uncomfortable assignment.

He watched her hunker down in her seat and frowned.

It would turn out to be a very long day for both of them.

_(No Evidence Available)_

His first thought was that he really needed to cut the necessity of sherry from his cooking repertoire.

The second was _'At least this time she's wearing clothes.'_

He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.

She was tapping unkempt fingernails in a vague, inconsistent rhythm; it vibrated through the metal countertop, lending its ghostly staccato to the echoes of the mansion.

The rain was beating an insistent drumbeat on the windows.

Before he'd left, Doctor Adachi had recommended that he shut off the air conditioning for the benefit of Jennifer's health. Cold promoted focus; she needed sleep.

Without the familiar _whirr_ and hiss, his home seemed unbelievably quiet; torn fingernails and rain, nothing else.

Everything was closed off; closed in, against reporters and invaders and raindrops, and he felt it.

At times like these, his home, suddenly warm and close, seemed surreal to him. Womblike or tomblike; he was never sure which.

And here was Jennifer, drinking sherry on his counter again.

Ironically, this time there were no cigarettes; no eyes in the gloom. Just Jennifer, barefoot again, visible and invisible, pieces of her hair shimmering in and out of sight- ghostly whorls in a room lit only by the light of blue digital appliance screens.

He reached for the light switch and stopped.

She laughed. It hung in the still air, jarringly warm against the uneven, echoing staccato of the rain.

He turned to look where he knew she was. His eyes hadn't adjusted yet; she kept slipping in and out of reality, betraying herself with brief flashes of low purple on a black bottle, suddenly bright when they hit the edge of a red label- sending low gleams of blue-white along her hair as she bent her head to hide a smile he couldn't see anyway.

A habit she'd picked up from him.

That black bottle rang sweet, glassy echoes through the counter as it impacted- as her arm sagged, veins heavy with liquor.

His eyes still hadn't adjusted. It was exactly the wrong level of light; just enough to see colour one moment and lose it the next.

To lose her the next.

He didn't know what to say to her.

For once, he didn't have to say anything at all.

"I wish you'd trust me."

Her voice, roughened with alcohol- she didn't slur: she mumbled, low and melodic, almost inaudible over the rhythm of the weather.

He just stared into the gloom, dumbstruck.

"I'm not stupid, Kaiba," she mumbled.

He couldn't help but smile at that. "I never said that you were, Nauswell," he responded. He could hear the smile in his voice. So could she.

She laughed again, but it was hard and bitter and it lingered in the room like a dark cloud.

"They're rushing my divorce papers."

He looked on silently, wary but curious.

A low _hmph_ of disdain. "But you don't know what that means, do you?_ If, then: it is folly to be wise._"

He raised an eyebrow sceptically and approached her, feeling his way along the island. "You can't fault me for being ignorant when you fail to enlighten me," he quipped drily. His fingers bumped the edge of a bowl; Mokuba, once again failing catastrophically to do something as simple as load the dishwasher. He noted that and filed it away.

"I wasn't faulting you," she muttered. It almost sounded apologetic.

He shook his head and ducked away his own smile. "You do realize that that idiom is meant ironically? It's not meant as a literal _'if, then' _clause."

She _hmph_ed again and shoved at his chest with a small, cold foot. He took that as a cue to stop his approach.

Whether it was proximity or that his eyes had finally adjusted, her slim person was faintly visible. She was looking up at him, leaned back on her elbows, bottle between her knees.

He couldn't read her expression, but he could hear the pain in her voice.

"Author imperative isn't naturally imperative," she contended gruffly. "There _is _something to be said about ignorance and happiness."

He felt the sigh rattle through his lungs; carefully placed a hand on her knee. She didn't resist. He was pleasantly surprised. She cut him off before he could finish his question.

"You don't want to know."

"Just because you don't want to tell me-"

"I don't_ want_ you to know."

Her voice cracked. Her legs drew up and in, out from under his hand. She jostled the sherry bottle in her haste. He caught it before it tipped- looked at it- put it on the island behind him.

There was a glassy chime by his foot as he turned. More bottles on the floor; of what, he couldn't tell. He nudged them again. '_All empty. Goddamn it.'_

"_You,_" he told her reproachfully, "are drunk."

Her face made a small motion in the gloom. He could only assume that she was sticking out her tongue at him. He sighed and reached for her again. "You-"

"_In vino veritas,"_ she muttered sharply. "Always doubting me. If you can force your truth on me, why can't I force my ignorance on you?"

He gritted his teeth, exasperated. "You can't fix things with ignorance, Jennifer," he shot crisply, reaching for her more intently.

She kicked out at him, growling obscenities. "No. Instead, you can _break_ them with truth." Banging echoes of elbows on metal as she struggled to sit up. "Not everything can be _fixed, _Kaiba."

He felt her hands grabbing the front of his shirt, balling fabric and buttons and starch, before he had a chance to react.

Her face was still unnaturally warm.

He wasn't certain if her intention had been to headbutt him or the forehead-to-forehead leaning closeness she'd actually achieved.

"Don't go to work tomorrow," she demanded quietly. "Mokuba, either. Stay here with me."

He raised his hand to her face almost automatically. The scent of her- of cheap soap and cheap shampoo and red clay and soft skin- lingered too close; familiar and mundane and bizarrely intoxicating. He pushed her back gently.

"You're drunk," he told her again, more firmly.

Her hands pulled and pushed at his shirt with a listless intensity that spoke volumes more of her frustration than her words did.

"I need you to trust me," she growled. Her voice was simultaneously furious and desperately unhappy. "You were supposed to be _there_ today. Stay _here_ tomorrow. _Stay with me_ tomorrow."

He looked down at her with quiet amazement. "Jennifer, security's on high alert- there are _still_ police officers patrolling the premises- this is- this is ludicrous-" He shook his head, baffled at her sudden intensity- at her sudden proximity- and, if he was being honest with himself, filled with frustrated displeasure at the source of her invitation. "You're _drunk_."

A thud and a low_ whuff_ of lost air as she suddenly sagged against him, leaning her head into his chest. He could hear her grinding her teeth. "You don't _understand_. I _need _you to trust me, Kaiba. _Stay with me_."

A hand that rose on its own, gravitating towards that unholy halo of prematurely white hair.

Air that had disappeared from his lungs, words that had disappeared from his mouth.

Her hands curled tighter into him, running the sharp tips of her fingers in tiny semi-circles on his chest. Accidental skin geometry at its finest.

She was curling those fingers into his brain again. He let his hands settle on her shoulders. She shivered.

"If you don't trust me this time, I'm going to lose the only thing I have." The silence was loaded; intimate. Dangerous. "_Please._"

A low, breathless laugh; the perfect pair to his wordless mouth.

"You were always asking me to beg for you," she mumbled wryly. He felt her breath through his shirt. "You said I could ask anything of you if I did. I'm asking now. _Please_, Kaiba. Stay with me tomorrow."

He ran a hand up her neck; through her hair.

It was such a familiar motion.

It was with great reluctance that he detached himself from her grip. She looked up at him with open desperation.

He looked back at her, forcing the expression from his face.

"Ask me when you're sober," he said quietly. "And I'll consider it."

As he turned away, there was nothing mirthful about the laugh that croaked out behind him.

"Kaiba?" she called. It was soft, childlike in its inexpressive flatness.

He paused without meaning to; turned to look and wished he hadn't.

The blue light of the digital clocks made her eyes as glassy and opaque as the bottle she'd been drinking from.

"I didn't want to know, and I wish I didn't, and I don't want you to know, but- but I do- and I want you to know- to realize now- that I didn't have a choice, and it doesn't mean- I didn't _want_ to know, and I_ shouldn't_ have called her, but I did because I didn't trust you, but _please. Please._ I need you to trust me, if only just this once. If you won't stay with me, then you _have _to trust me."

He hesitated, but only for a second.

"Ask me when you're sober," he repeated, "or tell me why you're asking."

She was silent long after he left the room.

_(No Evidence Available)_

He didn't know when in the night she'd crawled into his bed, but now, as the first fingers of light touched the dark comforter, she was the one who was sleeping.

She exhaled noisily as he smoothed the hair back from her face. He smiled, strangely relieved that she wasn't conscious to watch him do it.

She hadn't even stirred when he arose; sleeping the uninterruptable sleep of the very drunk, she'd just mumbled discontentedly and twitched. She was sweating profusely, but she'd shivered when he'd shifted the blankets back.

For that, he'd just sighed.

It was to be expected that she'd be as difficult asleep as awake.

Her dreaded _tomorrow_ had come with a sky still thick with clouds and air still heavy with moisture; as he stepped into the garage, he couldn't help but feel that the oppressive stillness of his home had followed him outside.

It was late enough in the year and early enough in the day that the colours outside were still flickering in and out like an old television- like a kitchen seen in the faint blue light of digital clocks.

He paused for a moment, almost compelled to go back inside. He wasn't, nor would he ever be, a superstitious person, but the dark, surreal persistence of the weather lent a certain intangible menace to mundane tasks.

The limousine flared into life functionally, purring as only well-cared for engines can. He felt the knots of tension in his shoulders loosen and almost laughed at himself.

He grimaced as he considered that there was no one as capable of making him paranoid as the woman passed out in his bed. He wasn't sure what that implied about him.

The car ride was seamless, marred by two short red lights. The rain still hadn't broken when he reached the office; he crossed the short distance from the car to the doors in comfort and peace.

His company's response to the security compromise was an unusually clean lobby, free from shoe-sole scuff-marks, as glassy and reflective as a lake.

He stepped on to the elevator comfortably. Everything was in order. More than in order, even.

Everything was optimal.

The _incident_ was being dealt with.

Jennifer's concern was incidental.

Yuuna's desk was empty; he checked his watch.

Optimal. She'd be picking up yesterday's reports from Public Relations for his perusal. Perfectly on time- if all was running well, she'd back just after he'd settled behind his desk.

It was when he stepped into his office that everything suddenly went wrong.

The furniture was perfect; better than perfect, since most of had been replaced. The carpet was immaculate. His immersion pod was… undergoing repairs, and therefore without a door.

Still acceptable.

It wasn't the furniture.

It was Mokuba.

A surge of adrenaline burst into his system, turning reality into something like the afterimage of fireworks; every breath ground in his chest, his ribs knotting together like the teeth of unstable gears as he tried to react fast enough for it to matter.

On that immaculately cleaned carpet, he saw Mokuba kneeling, knees splayed; staring up at him, moving to rise- too slowly to be effective, but with enough desperation that he knew something was horribly, impossibly wrong.

The deep, angry red of fresh trauma on his brother's cheek, below his eye; the kind that would bruise black and heal green and yellow.

A long scratch, raw and shallow, from a ring.

The fireworks in the afterimage blossomed behind his eyes; impact, somewhere far to right of his skull, left behind as he lost his footing.

The carpet, just incomprehensible twists and loops seen so close, pushed up between his fingers as he tried to catch himself and failed.

Always the man on traintracks, staring down the train, he turned without meaning or wanting to.

Black leather shoes, freshly polished, planted wide, and wide like the feet that wore them.

Hard, inorganic shapes marring the fall of those finely made dress pants; rigid parallel lines along the back of red legs, running from calf to hip.

Wide shoulders and a barrel chest under the breast of a scarlet jacket; the posture of a man held straight by pride- pride and the gleaming edge of a back brace, sandwiched between red and red, visible only from the floor.

The early morning light flashed once across the slick silver casing of an old flint and steel lighter.

Cigar smoke.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	16. Chapter 16

_**Note:**__I LOVE ALL OF YOU._

_Please forgive me._

_(__**Engineer's ring**__- even evil corporate masterminds have to have qualifications. Of all available, that seemed like an extremely credible one. Just sayin'.)_

_OKAY! TIME TO TRAINWRECK, FOLKS. _

_Hi-ho, hi-ho, straight to hell we go._

_**Synopsis:**__Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__ Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh, and oh god, please let me explain first._

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Sixteen_

Fragrant cigar smoke cut sinuous trails in the too-still air. He was afraid to breathe it in; strangely, pervasively afraid that it would force itself down into his lungs and suffocate him.

He watched smoke trickle out of both mouth and nose, increasing to a billow with a husky_ whuff_ of laughter.

Gozaburo Kaiba's smile was cold.

"_Boy."_

Words delivered from under a thick grey moustache; another billow of curling smoke, almost blue. The steely flash of light on an engineer's ring as a thick-fingered and calloused hand brought that cigar back towards that mouth.

Kaiba felt rather than willed his fingers to cling to the carpet. Every breath felt laborious; the air seemed to drag along his windpipe, its resistance stronger than his need to fill his empty lungs.

He heard a low, whimpering moan and tore away; turned, automatically, to his brother, just as he'd done so many times before. Mokuba's eyes were wild; even as his cheek began to swell, the whites of his eyes seemed to swallow those normally dark and lively irises. Kaiba watched his mouth move- heard a strangled noise of inarticulate terror- turned away.

Looked up again.

Gozaburo was laughing.

It was the quiet, creaky laugh of an old smoker- nothing like the full, daunting sounds that he had heard escape from those barrel-chested lungs so many years before.

Kaiba looked; saw.

That crisp salt and pepper hair was now mostly salt; even in that steely moustache, a tell-tale smattering of white.

Under that red coat, the low flash of that back brace.

Rigid lines along the backs of red legs. Parallel. Calf to hip.

'_Braces? A smoker's laugh and braces.'_

The horror of the situation was suddenly immediate.

Kaiba staggered to his feet, instinctively moving between his step-father and his brother. "You- How did you get in here?" He heard the words fall in an off-beat, croaking cadence, like the speaker had forgotten how to speak. For a heady, endless instant between heartbeats, he wondered who had said it.

Gozaburo raised a heavy brow, let loose another cloud of smoke. "Didn't think that would be your first question, boy." Kaiba watched him tap ash onto the carpet; watched it fall, watched the fibres curl and singe.

For once, he didn't have to ask. Instead, he asked, "Yuuna?"

Gozaburo smiled with a mouth full of large, worn teeth.

Something heavy was pulling his intestines towards the floor. "…Kimura?"

A _huff_, a billow. "Was mine long before he was yours."

He couldn't force the next name out. For all the inexorable, gutting pull of the ground, an equivalent power was still pushing up against his diaphragm, squeezing the air from his lungs.

She was right.

He didn't want to know.

Gozaburo stepped towards him.

He flinched back reflexively.

Mocking smoke and laughter.

And, for no reason he could discern, when the impossibly sensible part of his emotional subconscious stirred a sunless white foot over the threshold of its shuttered lockbox and stepped out into the sound and flame and confusion of his consciousness, it sounded like her.

_'Jesus, Kaiba. Look at that. He's an old man. He can't stand straight on his own. He probably has a cane. Fuck, probably hid it; show no weakness thing and all that, you know. What are you so fucking afraid of?'_

And it didn't matter. In a moment of bleakness, in that fatal concoction of humour and despair, he felt that too-painful sting of correction: even his subconscious had put more faith in her judgement than him.

He was alone in his foolishness.

As the heat of cigar smoke ran a curled and taunting finger over his cheek, the tightly-knit muscles in his legs and abdomen gave way. Even as his fingers touched the carpet- even as a hand that could only be his brother's ghosted his shoulder, carrying close behind a noise of soft, distracted concern, he both wondered and understood.

"_There is something to be said about ignorance and happiness."_

He didn't want to know.

He knew. He wondered.

He didn't want to know, but he already knew too much.

Sharp light across that old flint and steel lighter again; a strange flash amidst blue smoke coloured blood-and-foam rabies pink by that quick-changing early daylight. If he'd ever believed in hell, the glowing red end of that cigar would have been the tongue of his tormenter.

He didn't. It still was.

"Really a shame, boy. You'll never make a Kaiba."

He wanted to say _Thank God_, but for a moment, the tone in the voice of the man who had never been his father toed the line of affection, and he could do nothing but stare. His restlessly twitching fingers found Mokuba's bony knuckles on the carpet behind him. His brother gripped his hand desperately, like a child, and even after years, the words _It's going to be alright _found their way into his mouth and stewed there unused.

The burning red tongue of the devil bobbed as his adopted father tucked thick-fingered hands in his pockets and leaned, grunting, against the desk he'd destroyed the day before.

" _'The first meal a spider tastes is his mother'_," he wheezed, sending a sneer of that rabies-foam smoke coiling out. A diseased storm cloud, Kaiba thought feverishly. _Cumulus sanguinis_, the red cloud. Cigar ash fell and pirouetted in deceptively delicate fine grey flakes.

The shadows cast by those heavy grey eyebrows turned deep-socketed eyes into death's head pits edged by the furrowed skin of an old man whose face reflected years of snarls and sneers.

"My mother's words," he said, worn teeth champing on pale brown paper, just a finger's length from a crisp black band with words in another country's language and a stranger's cameo face embossed in gold.

A sharp taste or an acrid smell; Kaiba tasted bile.

There was a moment of contemplative, almost thoughtless stillness in which he heard nothing but wheezing, breathed nothing but the burning of acid and smoke.

"Tell me- was that after she drowned your elder brother, or before you paid the doctor and orderly at the psychiatric ward to triple her evening dosage of anti-psychotics?"

Her voice, smoky from sickness, cut through the air like the tarry fumes of another man's cigarette.

He watched the sharp turn of Gozaburo's head; heard Mokuba's muffled noise of protestation. Knew that he was the only one not looking.

Reluctance twisted the bottoms of his lungs. He didn't want to know.

He turned anyway.

Her eyes looked stormy, almost colourless, amidst the gore of smoke that had already wreathed her. Her face was still pale with breaking fever; he watched a tear of sweat weave its way down her throat from behind her ear.

Down from one of those last scraps of black hair.

She was tight; purposefully expressionless, eyes fixed forward.

On that one last question he didn't want answered. On a slow building fire that was either his pyre or hers. On what had come of his trusting his back to those torn fingernails.

Finally facing the prospect of betrayal- and she was right. He didn't want to know.

He heard rather than saw the man in the red suit's smile. "_Oshibka,"_ he greeted warmly.

She inclined her head in acknowledgement. _"Krasnyĭ."_

He watched Gozaburo settle back against the desk, shadowed eyes half-lidded, cigar working from one side of his mouth to the other.

The silence lingered, pregnant but not still- early contractions were already shivering through the smoke. He wanted to raise his hand, wanted to swat them, still them.

Wondered, vaguely, at his own inaction.

A thin stream of white from between thin lips, like steam from a kettle.

"You don't look too surprised to see me, _Artois._"

Two quick flickers of expression- confusion, recognition- convulsed across her face. Her thin white fingers tightened around the worn leather handle of her bag.

And suddenly, something let go of the bottom of his lungs. He heard Mokuba echo the name numbly behind him; almost smiled.

She was looking at him, side-long and surreptitiously.

Her eyes snapped away when he met them. Unease weighed on his relief.

"I didn't exactly stop to check," she responded. Her voice carried with a strange sort of hollow glibness.

A short blue puff of smoky laughter, foamy and opaque as the light caught it. "I thought _you_ were the careful one," the smoker shot, cold and sly.

He didn't like the death-mask calmness that rippled down from her eyes. The hard knot of his diaphragm started to push upwards again. He stared at her, willing her to look at him- willing_ himself_ to rise, to do anything but sit and _watch_, but his entire body seemed to shiver with nervous energy and sag with exhaustion. His legs were numb.

His lips were numb.

Jennifer tilted her head coquettishly. The look didn't carry over past the motion.

He almost found words. Gozaburo stared down his interruption.

"Adults are talking, boy."

And the words _A child speaks only when spoken to_ found their way around his tongue and past his teeth before he even knew what he was saying. He couldn't help the nausea that rose at his adopted father's proud sneer of approval. In the corner of his eye, he saw a shudder walk up his would-be lover's spine.

She didn't turn. He was glad. His mouth felt ashy from words he'd thought he'd forgotten. That all-too-familiar itch was starting to burn along the underside of his right wrist; he felt a long-slumbering ache wake deep in the tendons of his hand.

And, like an old friend, the sour taste of nauseous expectation rose and smoldered in his throat.

The floor under the carpet creaked imperceptibly as she shifted from one foot to the other, tucking that worn and formless bag under one arm. The bones in her elbow popped like a gunshot.

Gozaburo's expression had taken a strange turn. Kaiba watched his eyes travel from him to the woman on which his eyes had lingered; watched him shift that cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

His stare was incautious but oddly watchful. "You know my son?"

She smiled. "You have two. Which one are you referring to?"

A smoker's opaque snort of disapproval. "I have one son. He has a brother," he said snidely before a strange ripple of expression changed contempt to contemplation.

Mokuba's fingers tightened convulsively around his own.

The muscles in her thin jaw hardened and squared before smoothing out, leaving her looking almost serene. "You don't," she corrected quietly. Gozaburo shot her a cautious look, wrinkling the skin around those deep-socketed eyes. "You don't have a son," she clarified. "Just these two, whatever you designate them."

Even the movement of the smoke in the room seemed to suddenly hang still. Kaiba watched a man in a red suit raise one steely eyebrow, both, and then drop them both in obvious suspicion and distrust.

For an instant, there was something almost like pity on her face.

She watched him for a second and then sighed. "Just as much a sucker as me, _Krasnyĭ._" Her mouth tugged out at the edge. "All that waiting, and for what?"

One of those silvery braces clicked as he shifted; an almost inaudible grunt of discomfort. Visible amusement crept into his features, tempering his hard, suspicious look with dark humour. "This is your fault," he told her gruffly, gesturing to his legs. She shrugged indifferently.

"Hey, my knees and ankles are fucked, too. Maybe wasn't the most informed decision I've ever made."

Gozaburo loosed a wheezy laugh as he ashed his cigar on the carpet again. "So: here to kill me properly, Artois?"

Jennifer inclined her head in what could have been indifference or affirmation. A dry smile played around her lips. "Don't complain too much; most of us don't die smoking a _Cohiba Behike_."

One of those heavy eyebrows quirked. "Good eye."

Kaiba reflected for a brief, lucid moment, and concluded that his life was incredibly surreal.

He caught her looking at him with those glassy green eyes and lost his train of thought.

Gozaburo's look of suspicion resurfaced. He could see the question forming.

Evidently, she did, too.

"Fucked for a while," she told him informatively. Even the smoky quietness of her voice couldn't disguise the stilted, clipped tone the words slipped out in.

Kaiba watched something odd and convulsive and bafflingly, _terrifyingly_ familiar happened to Gozaburo's expression.

The old man broke his own stormy silence, but the break was gruff and reluctant. "…Good eye."

She smiled crookedly.

"I also drink Scotch; peaty, preferably," she drawled. "No water, though; brings out the sweetness too much."

Gozaburo snorted smoke through his nose and mirrored that crooked, closed-mouthed smile, bristling that heavy grey moustache out of the shadow of his nose. "You would've made a good Kaiba," he allowed, toeing a mysterious line somewhere between sincerity and mockery.

Her face smoothed again, but it was anything but serene.

"Don't misunderstand me," she said softly. "I said you didn't have a _son_."

That slow-moving smoke, so much more like the languid, low-hanging cloud-cover of a hostile alien world than anything he'd ever designed, suddenly seemed to carry with it an indescribable sense of falling- _burning-_ through the atmosphere.

On a very basic level, he was aware that he was staring at her.

There didn't seem to be any other acceptable course of action.

In what was either his imagination or the corner of his eye, he saw Gozaburo's face move through a series of fascinating changes before the old man laughed incredulously.

She cut him off. "Kyoko Nauswell, Itoman. Southern Beach Hotel Cleaning Service. Fall of 1987; _'Okinawa Research and Development Conference for the Purpose of National Defense'_."

She paused for a second, blank and distant.

"Some top floor suite. South-west corner, I think. Dunno. It was hard pinning that down."

His adopted father's look of shock was blank and unaffected that it transcended past its potentially comedic effect into pure grotesquery.

"Impossible- you're too old-" he argued, sputtering. She threw something at him. It took Kaiba a moment to register that it was a newspaper.

He saw himself in the photograph on the front, tinged red by afternoon light or a commercial printer that wasn't always true to colour.

And her, stepping out of a limousine, unusually photogenic for the first and worst time in her life.

"The woman whose passport I falsified is too old. I'm twenty-three."

Gozaburo unfolded it, expression unreadable. "_Jennifer?_" The name sounded phlegmatic and thick coming from his mouth.

She swept an arm out in a mocking bow.

He only realized he'd said anything when she looked at him, visibly startled.

He caught something desperate flickering across her face; watched another bead of sweat weave its way down into the hollow of one collarbone.

She looked away again.

Her mouth worked restlessly as she watched Gozaburo run a broad thumb down the crease of the paper, just staring.

"She would have told me," he said finally. Jennifer snorted.

"Would _you_ have?"

He echoed her snort with a gruff laugh and then frowned again. "Why didn't you?"

He heard rather than saw the tightness in her throat.

"Didn't know."

Gozaburo refolded the paper; looked at her with those dark eyes. His cigar shifted restlessly between his teeth, moving from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"So. You're going to kill me?"

She inclined her head. " _'The first meal a spider tastes,' _" she echoed, and then started to whistle. The high notes echoed off of the glass and hung in his left ear.

_Boots on marble,_ he thought numbly.

Something strange happened.

An expression he had seen before rippled across that old man's face. It was more than calm; it was almost joy. Elation.

For a second, it was dark, and the air was full of static. Rain beat on the window her fingers lingered on. Lightening flashed and she was laughing, looking back at him with incomprehensible, transcendent joy, telling him _there's a little a rain in all of us_.

It was serenity.

White smoke leaked from his adopted father's smile. "Just like a Kaiba."

And for no reason he could possibly explain, she looked sad. "Very last of the breed," she murmured.

His smile faltered.

Kaiba watched those stormy eyes drift towards him again. "Sorry," she said. The skin around her eyes was tight with pain and humour and darkness. "Was bluffing all this time. Never could have followed through. Transylvania's safe from the likes of me."

Her words sounded like a joke.

Her mouth said them like an apology.

Gozaburo was looking at her with flat incomprehension. She looked back, face still tight with distress.

"Sorry, _Krasnyĭ._ Last bullet you fired was a blank. I've never had a period. Always been too skinny, I guess."

That tenuous serenity started to fade into what looked very much like panic.

Jennifer looked both pained and pleased.

"_If, then: _Last of the breed," she repeated. "Just Darwinism. Nothing personal. One less outdated genus. Just making room for other bugs, _Krasnyĭ_."

The glowing end of the devil's tongue dipped as an old man's face fell slack with something that hovered between shock and denial.

His mutter was almost inaudible. "Impossible."

She wasn't quite smiling. "Just fact. Ovaries like raisins, probably. Got no bullets of my own."

She paused, and then laughed a little- quietly, mirthlessly.

"Sorry."

Something dark and convicted convulsed across his face. He jolted towards her, the muscles in his broad jaw hard with tension.

She drew something bright and silvery from that shapeless bag, and he stopped.

It took his eldest son a moment to register what it was.

_'Ueda's service revolver,'_ Kaiba thought numbly. _'She has Ueda's gun.'_

It seemed pointless to ask how.

She was holding it by the barrel.

It seemed pointless to ask why.

Nothing made sense anymore. Dali was walking lobsters across the walls.

Gozaburo stared at it for a moment, and then laughed harshly. "That's not even loaded," he accused. His voice creaked painfully on the vowels.

She looked disappointed. Her head tilted, falling slightly to the side as though it was drawn by gravity rather than pushed by will.

"I already told you," she murmured softly, "that I don't have any bullets."

He heard rather than saw the stock of the gun collide with the side of his adoptive father's head.

He felt Mokuba surge forward beside him and grabbed him, dragged him back down, without even really knowing why.

He tasted smoke.

Smoke and bile.

The floor under the carpet shook as a barrel-chested old man in a red suit tumbled into it.

Her fingers were white, startlingly, poetically white, against his throat.

Shining slivers of sweat were tracing their way down the grooves and valleys of hers.

Mokuba squirmed under his fingers and he clung to him, staring but rigid, until it was over.

Until those fingers stopped twitching and clawing; until those feet fell still, shiny black shoes falling open.

His eyes were still open.

The cigar was burning the carpet.

She picked it up and stood, just looking at it.

He heard his own throat make a guttural noise of protest. His brother had started to shiver; he could hear his teeth chattering.

And she looked over at him with glassy, distant eyes and said, "It just seems like a shame."

He watched tears fill her waterline. Watched them work sinuous trails across her face.

Saw her furrow her brow in incomprehension as moisture darkened the paper of the cigar.

Watched her drop it with something like horror.

Saw her touch her face in disbelief; draw her fingers away and stare at them.

Loosened stiff fingers from around Mokuba's collar and struggled to stand as she staggered back against the desk, muttering desperately.

"No, no, _no._ This _isn't right. No. __**No.**__"_

Tears were turning blue jeans black as she drew her knees up to her face.

He could hear his brother retching behind him.

Far below, he heard the wail of sirens and wondered nonsensically if they somehow already knew.

Somehow wished that they did.

For the first time in his life, he had absolutely no idea what to do.

_(No Evidence Available)_


	17. Chapter 17

_**Note: **__Let me explain. Remember what I said before? In the author's note of Chapter Fourteen?_

**Everything is Jennifer**_._

_Really. That's the cliché of this story, right?_

_If you can think up anything filled with more exorbitant fandom clichés than __**Gozaburo Kaiba's omnipresent supergenius lovechild with a traumatic past**__, please, let me know. _

_Now, the real question: Are you still biting?_

_Edit: Welp, this chapter turned out nothing like I expected! AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT._

_It's not the end, though. Just… an unexpected break from tension!_

_**Synopsis: **__Seto Kaiba has spent his adult life developing immersive games to escape unanswered questions, but virtual reality really does make the world much smaller; in the end, how much space for unknown answers is left? KaibaxOC_

_**Disclaimer:**__Kazuki Takahashi owns Yu-Gi-Oh and I'm a terrible little bastard._

_No Evidence Available_

_Chapter Seventeen_

A sprightly young man, accent leaning Northern- somewhere outside of Hokkaido, maybe- in a crisp blue uniform.

"Congratulations; the courts have ruled it self defense. Just a couple of formalities and you're free to leave."

His face resembled Toshio's, a little.

Jennifer Nauswell- _very_ recently Nakamura, as the papers liked to point out- just wondered why he sounded so _goddamn _happy about that.

Nobody else seemed particularly happy.

_"The correlation between ignorance and happiness,"_ she mumbled to herself in English. The young officer just smiled at her quizzically before turning towards the filing cabinet. She stared back.

"I confessed," she told his back. It was a listless little couplet of words; she knew full well that what she'd done and what she'd confessed to had had exactly zero bearing on the ruling.

If it could even be called that.

Less than a month since the whole thing had blown open, and Japan's biggest case of the century was being dropped as casually and obviously as a candy wrapper on a sidewalk.

And no one would notice.

She hadn't said anything. She was sure Kaiba hadn't said anything. Nor Mokuba.

She was _relatively_ certain that the dead man in question hadn't said anything, either.

But a surreptitious _somebody_ had leaked the scandal-within-a-scandal and the media was in too much of an uproar to notice or care whether or not one Jennifer Nauswell, originally of Okinawa, would be indicted.

Everyone just wanted to know if the paternity test would come back positive.

Except her.

She wanted a lobotomy.

The prospect of it seemed peaceful.

The cheerful officer in blue handed her a weft of paper. He was still smiling.

She looked at them dispassionately and sighed.

"…I need one more form. Can you get it for me?"

_(No Evidence Available)_

She looked at the door unhappily. She didn't want to be here.

_'It's not a choice,'_ she told herself. It didn't answer.

Jennifer opened the door and watched weathered hardwood slide silently across seamless black marble. She heard Bela Lugosi's halting English filter out from the scarred and aimless room of her subconscious, just as it always did when she looked out across this world.

Otherwise, her mind was silent.

When she most needed its distraction, that needling, never-silent voice had abandoned her.

Cynicism. _'Of course.'_

She stepped inside.

He wasn't waiting for her.

She removed her shoes slowly and quietly, as though stalling would somehow save her from what was coming. From complexity and uncertainly and the _horror_.

Double-knotted shoelaces were simple, even stiff with a long-dried mixture of road salt and the grey sluicing water that collected in those worn depressions in the asphalt that every car tire would hit. The thin layer of salty grit they left on her fingers was unpleasant, but not impossible. The pungency of salt and pollution felt real, just like the sharp tang of the soap that would wash her fingers clean. These were simple equations.

The thick, humid silence that was the mansion's lobby with no whispering air conditioners or nearly inaudible footsteps or demands for clarity was infinitely less so.

She felt like the air was oppressive with his emotions and understood that she was applying her own anxiety to it and _hated_ how sober knowing that meant she was. Her thoughts came in aimless streams rather the bumps and jolts of an internal dialogue- which she infinitely preferred- and her heartbeat was rising behind her sternum and she knew that that was anxiety too and she _hated, absolutely __**hated**_ that she knew.

She hated that she knew that he probably hated her.

She hated him for probably hating her and hated him for not trusting her and hated herself for not seeming trustworthy and hated that she was so worked up over conjecture when the reality was probably _so much worse_.

The marble felt cold through her socks and she _loved_ it for it, because for a second, she didn't know where he was.

And then she knew he was in his office.

He was in his office because the library and the bedroom and the living room and the kitchen would all remind him of her, but the office had always been _his place_.

She looked at the door hiding in the gloom of the main floor hallway, just behind the closet under the left staircase, and lingered on the marble.

He probably hated her.

She hated that.

The doorknob was slick and cold and for a heady, impossible second, she was relieved because she couldn't open it.

And then it turned and she felt stupid and angry and embarrassed and he was in his office, head turned vaguely in her direction.

He said nothing.

She waited, and then sighed.

"Giving me the silent treatment doesn't disguise the fact that you don't know what to say," she told him quietly. The words burned with the bitter aftertaste of better times.

He closed his laptop and sat back in his chair, still looking down as the whirring of its fan heightened and then slowed.

"Why are you here?"

She shoved the form at him. "Sign this."

He looked at her hand uncomprehendingly. "I thought they'd detained you."

For a second, she didn't know what he was referring to.

She laughed. It hurt. "I was acquitted."

A brow wrinkled in confusion. She flicked her wrist, waving the paper in his direction. He made no move to take it.

"I thought you'd confessed."

She confirmed that.

Both brows furrowed.

She sighed again, feeling irritation creep into the space between her eyes. "Just sign the form, Kaiba."

His eyes rose to meet hers.

She prepared herself for that too-fresh expression of exhaustion and incomprehension and that _horror, _that goddamn_ horror-' please, please don't look at me like that'-_ and met an all-too-familiar expression of stubborn annoyance instead.

"You're not going to tell me why."

It was half-statement, half-question.

She blinked.

_'You don't hate me,'_ she almost said.

And suddenly she was furious.

"Sign the fucking paper," she snarled, throwing it at him with all of her force.

It curled, rose in a smooth curve, and then slid to the floor. She battled pointless rage as he looked down at it and then up at her, for all appearances completely unfazed.

He crossed his arms.

She shook with anger.

He picked up the paper from the floor and looked at it.

"_Disavowal of Rights to Inheritance?"_

He looked up at her again. His confusion was obvious.

She waited for it to sink in, prepared herself for his reaction when he grasped the finer implications of their situation, and was met with blank inquisition.

Jennifer felt the overwhelming desire to strangle him. Of all things, _this_ she'd rather not have to explain. Some of it she couldn't- not yet- but the rest, the other things, twisted nauseously in her gut like the promise of vomit.

She'd seen the horror on that face. It was the look she never wanted to see again- one that had seared her, branded her soul with guilt and shame. She'd expected it from the moment those eyes had met hers and because it hadn't come, she shook with tense expectation and wary relief and _rage _because he was going to betray her, because it was coming. It had to be coming.

He was leading her on, looking so calm and distant. Looking so _normal_.

Like everything could be okay, somehow.

And she was angry because if she wasn't then she'd be relieved and then it would all hurt _so much more_ when the horror came.

Something quiet and familiar woke inside of her and whispered hopefully.

'_**If**__ it comes.'_

And she hated it for suggesting that it was even possible because it meant that somewhere, deep down, she _hoped_.

And she hated herself for hoping.

Those too-bright eyes stared through her.

She stared back.

"You're not this stupid, Kaiba."

Those eyes flickered over her face searchingly. He said nothing.

"I'm older than you," she pointed out.

He raised a dark eyebrow. "I'm aware," his mouth allowed, curling slightly at the corners in amusement.

_'You're not this stupid,'_ she almost said again.

Instead, she felt her jaw muscles bundle and ache as she clenched. Pain shot from the roots of her teeth to her temples.

Her patience snapped.

"_Apparently, _you fail to realize that a genetic confirmation of paternity legitimizes my existence as an heir," she seethed, "necessitating the re-distribution of family estate according to the stipulations of Gozaburo's will."

He'd gone very still.

She swallowed nothing down a painfully dry throat. "I'm _older than you_, Kaiba."

He said nothing. Sick certainty twisted under her ribs.

"Sign the fucking paper," she muttered.

He did.

She reached out a hand for it.

He ignored her, eyes scanning down it again. She watched his hand as he began to tap his pen against the header impatiently, and waited.

_'It's coming,'_ she thought nauseously.

His head turned very slightly.

"Why are you so willing to beggar yourself?"

She stared at the side of face, baffled as his eyes moved down through the lines of text again, looking for something and not finding it.

She heard her mouth say something she really hadn't wanted to say.

_'I don't want to be your sister.'_

She watched his tapping slow. Something strange and uncomprehending crossed his expression.

The edges of her vision went white with humiliated anger.

"Newsflash: _your _foster father is _my_ biological father- on paper that makes me a patricidal murderer guilty of _legal incest. Funny fucking story_. Maybe you should have tuned in earlier,_ little brother,_" she snarled.

His pen suddenly stilled. She met his stare.

His expression sent a chill skittering down her spine.

One hand, balled into a white-knuckled fist, rose slowly from the paper to linger in front of his mouth.

_'That look,'_ she thought insensibly, fixated.

She'd seen the apparently unflappable Seto Kaiba display a colourful spectrum of attitudes. She'd thought she'd seen them all.

This wasn't _that_ look.

This wasn't a look she'd ever seen before.

This was something incomprehensible, both bizarrely relieved and_ unbelievably furious_.

He started to rise. She stepped back, alarmed.

His mouth was smiling in a way she didn't particularly like. She moved for the door.

Somehow, she always forgot how _goddamn fast_ he could move when he was angry.

He slammed a hand against the door, sending it rattling into its frame, and leaned towards her. She jerked away, nervous.

This wasn't the horror. She didn't know what this was.

Those eyes flickered over her face the same way they had over the page- searching. '_And finding, apparently,'_ she thought, transfixed and vaguely terrified.

He was close enough that she felt rather than heard him laugh.

"_This _is why. I had assumed you had a plausible motivation, and _this- __**this**_**-** is why."

She edged away.

He fingers closed on the front of her shirt and pulled. She yelped, struggling to keep her feet.

He was too close.

She looked away anxiously.

His free hand flew from the door towards her face. For an instant, she thought he was going to slap her.

The strange, familiar sensation of his fingers gripping her jaw.

_"Look at me,"_ he seethed. She obliged him despite herself.

He'd dropped all pretense of amusement. "Listen _closely_: legally, you are a naturalized American citizen. The circumstances of my adoption are legal, not biological. We met as physiological adults and at no point did we _ever_ share a platonic bond. We do not, in _any way_, share a lineage. The Japanese family registry does not even consider relationships between adopted children and family members to be incestuous. I am _not your brother_," he growled.

She protested without really knowing what she was protesting. "It's the principal of the thing; it's _fucked up, _Kaiba."

He responded by shoving her against the door.

"In _what way?" _he hissed. "_Please_, inform me."

She looked at him, flabbergasted.

'_This conversation has gone in a really weird direction.'_

"Isn' that… kind of… the wrong thing to be preoccupied with at the moment?"

He just looked at her.

"I, um… I murdered someone. In front of you. Actually, um, I accused someone of being my father and _then_ I murdered him. In front of you."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I had accepted that you were responsible for my foster father's death some time ago. All that changed was the time frame."

She felt her sanity warp trying to follow his thought process. "That's so reasonable it wraps around into being totally unreasonable again. Anyway: I'm still the fucking _lovechild_ of a psychopath who systematically abused you. _Also_, by extension, your step-sister," she pointed out.

He looked up at the wall above her head and then down at her again.

"I don't care."

She gawked. "What? How can you just _not care?_"

"I've decided not to."

Her brain stalled trying to comprehend that.

"You can't just _decide_ not to care about something," she protested. _'Look how well that turned out for __**me**__," _a cynical something added. She welcomed it gratefully and gave up even trying to understand what was happening.

"_Look,"_ she sighed. "Whether or not _you_ care, somehow I doubt Mokuba shares your feelings, and just by _being_ here, I've brought hell down on all of us. I just… there's just a couple of things I still need to do, and then I'll get out of here."

The unhappy knot in her stomach lurched at his expression.

"_Out?"_ he asked, twisting the word around his tongue like it held some foreign concept.

She decided to demonstrate with another pass at the door handle.

He responded by leaning heavily against the door. The light from ceiling disappeared he towered over her. She looked up.

There was something flat, cynical, but almost amused there.

"Ah," he said pleasantly, smiling. She smiled back automatically, confused by his reaction. He leaned closer.

And suddenly she was trapped in an ever-shrinking space. She looked up again, alarmed.

He no longer looked amused.

She felt his fingers ghost the skin below her ear. "Four years ago, I _let_ you go. You _were_ out of here. And then you came _back_, and you came back with someone else- and I let you. And then he left, and you _stayed_." His hand wandered up to her cheek. She shivered.

Those eyes were bright and cold, but not angry.

He spoke softly, like he was teaching a particularly stupid child.

"You had your window," he told her, "and you let it pass."

She stared at him. "Are you… telling me that I can't leave?"

He gave her a dark little _as-expected-of-a-genius _smile.

She furrowed her eyebrows incredulously. "What exactly are you going do to stop me?" she asked, laughing.

His smile became so incredibly sinister that she immediately stopped.

"It's only considered sensible to outfit wayward housepets with sub-dermal locator chips," he said pleasantly.

She gaped, dumbfounded.

"You're completely insane."

Even through the haze of her shock, he looked more fond than psychotic. _'Though the two certainly aren't mutually exclusive,' _she thought distantly.

The roughness of his thumb traced along the edge of her jaw. "No sane man could put up with you," he admitted, voice tinged with what sounded suspiciously like affection.

She didn't feel capable of doing anything but staring.

"Completely insane," she repeated, shaking her head helplessly. He snorted.

"You are the least qualified to judge my sanity," he told her.

She felt his hand wander to her side and had a weird flash of clarity. "No," she muttered, "I'm pretty sure you've lost your mind, otherwise you'd be pumping me for information. You're displaying exceptional amounts of crazy right now."

He responded by burying his face in her throat. "I _do _have priorities."

"Sexually harassing me doesn't seem like the most natural first on that list," she said.

She shivered as his teeth grazed her skin and shoved him off with no small amount of difficulty.

He looked somewhat unimpressed.

She looked back, bemused.

"Needy jail wife," she said without thinking and suddenly, he was livid.

She squeaked as he grabbed her by the belt and yanked her back against him. His mouth grazed her ear. "I have always pushed you first because you have always made me work inside of a deadline," he murmured silkily and bit the shell of her ear lightly. "Now that I know you're not trying to kill me, I have no intention of letting you go anywhere. I can take my time dragging it out of you." Those eyes glimmered into her line of sight. He chuckled; she shivered at the warmth of his breath. "And now that I know that you've been rejecting me on not on any legitimate basis of fealty or distaste, but on some ridiculous misconception of our relationship to one another, my priorities favour correcting that," he purred.

She laughed breathlessly as he pushed a knee between her thighs. "What ever happened to 'If you ask me to, I'll stop'?" she needled.

Suddenly her senses were full of more coffee than sensuous cologne and the warmth of his body was suffocatingly immediate. She felt him smile against her lips. "So ask me to stop," he teased, tracing his fingers along the bare skin between shirt and jeans.

She couldn't breathe, let alone speak.

She _wanted_, and the _want _thought his logic was very sound, very sound indeed.

His chest rumbled with laughter. "That's what I thought."

She slid her hands up his front hesitantly- felt the broad muscles in his shoulders, played with the short hairs at the base of his neck, remembered the softness of his hair, reveled in the scent of him- and suddenly felt like crying.

"You were supposed to hate me," she fumbled and he chuckled again, thumbs drawing shivering lines down her hipbones. She groaned. "_Vous trichez toujours dans ce jeu."_

He paused, drawing back and looking at her with an odd expression. She looked back at him, puzzled.

"Don't accuse me of cheating when it's not my bed you've been sleeping in," he said softly.

For a second, she didn't get it.

When she did, she was floored.

"I was _married_," she objected.

His look said plainly that that was no excuse.

She almost said something and then just laughed and shook her head. He looked offended. She reached for him, straining upwards to wrap her arms around his neck. "You're a ridiculous human being."

She had enough time to see mischief flit into his expression before he had her legs around his waist and her back against the wall.

She _whumph'_ed at the shift. "Also an excellent Venus fly trap," she groused.

He dug his teeth into the crook of her neck.

"Priorities," he murmured.

She _hmm_'d in mock disapproval and then something occurred to her.

"You were joking about that pet chip thing, right?"

_(No Evidence Available)_


	18. In Closing

_Hey, folks._

_Long time no see. Hope you don't hate me too much for disappearing._

_Alright, it's immensely evident at this point that I am never going to update this goddamn thing again. I apologize. I've been lost to the Homestuck fandom for a little over a year now (and have built up a massive fucking following, how the hell did that happen) but I feel you all deserve a little closure with this fic._

_It's not that I don't love it anymore- I will probably never stop loving Jennifer. She's fused herself into my goddamn soul._

_Alright: the man behind everything is The Russian. He's the Big Bad, so to speak, and Jennifer knows this (or at least has considered this possibility and suspects it) because she's a hyper-intelligent paranoid lunatic._

_This is what I had written in preparation of that climactic scene:_

Seto Kaiba was confused.

Disturbed.

Suspicious.

A cold sliver of fear was sliding down through his intestines.

Genjikou Industrial was a Chinese company.

This was not a Chinese man.

This was a Russian man.

_"__There was one- some skinny black suit- who was always speaking Russian with him-__"_

It was inconsequential. Russia was the largest country in the world.

Russia bordered on China.

It was just a coincidence.

One of Kaiba Corporation's oldest affiliates was Russian. A supplier. High-grade metals and plastics. One of the only affiliates to cling on during the company's shift in purpose. Metals and plastics were integral to the manufacturing of benign and dangerous technology alike.

In fact, Genjikou Industiral was a subsidiary of that company.

It only made sense that one of their representatives was Russian.

"_-some skinny black suit-"_

It was perfectly reasonable.

Perfectly.

Kaiba felt sick.

The Russian smiled disarmingly at him, long fingers still resting on the header of the agreement.

White paper.

Crisply folded, leisurely gliding- sleek, fastidious, aerodynamic, symmetrical-

He caught the paper airplane before he'd really registered what it was, and just looked at it, nonplussed.

The Russian just looked amused.

"Miss Artois, was it?" he asked in his low, sinuous voice, and then paused purposefully. "My mistake, Miss Nauswell- no, Mrs. Nakamura, now, isn't it? Or is it…?"

Sloppy white hair beside the _Yggdrasill_ unit, sitting lazily on the ground, chin lifted, eyes narrowed.

"It's never going to be Miss Kaiba, if that's what you're asking."

_So yeah: plot twist._

_Remember that meeting with Genjikou Industrials? That's what's up. Once The Russian figured out what the deal was with Jennifer and Gozaburo, he started planning. _

_His intent was to corner Jennifer Nauswell, Seto and Mokuba Kaiba into the public limelight, and then murder them all via a handy "accident" in transit from Japan to China during the business negotiations, removing all plausible heirs, tying up all the loose ends and leaving him, Gozaburo's onetime business partner, to take due advantage of the fact that because Jennifer was exposed as Gozaburo's biological child, her mother (born a Japanese citizen) is the benefactor should something terrible happen to Jennifer, and the inheritor of all material possessions should all three kids kick the bucket. If it was just the boys, it'd go to the state, but killing them first and __**then**__ Jennifer would tip her off faster than the Titanic sank after it broke in half. (They rushed her divorce papers because, otherwise, Nakamura would be her benefactor. As much of a baby as he seems like, he'd be a tougher customer than Jennifer's mom. The trouble with idealists, you know?)_

_**That's what's up.**__ The guy is a fucking prick, and a psychopath to boot._

_Jennifer is slightly less insane, but infinitely more paranoid. _

_Needless to say, she watches the escalation between Genjikou Industrial and Kaiba Corp. and cottons on to what's happening pretty fucking fast. _

_She's also aware that he smoothed over one investigation, so it stands to reason that he could do it again, meaning she can't rely on traditional law enforcement._

_So she relies on the one thing nobody would expect her to: the media. _

_Because she's accidentally risen to media darling status, intentionally getting bugged on short notice is just about the simplest fucking thing she could do- and she __**does.**_

_She calls him out on all his shit, and he essentially pulls the "Unless you're going to push me out of a window, too, Miss Artois, I'm afraid this is all rather pointless" gambit, with undertones of "I'll still find a way to kill you and you know it." _

_She's broadcasting live. Because she's a terrible, wonderful psychotic who was really, __**really**__ attached to her best friend._

_This is the rest of what I had written:_

"Let's be fair: You took everything from me," Jennifer said matter-of-factly, that earnest, faux-apologetic smile still playing around her lips. "So I'm taking everything."

The red half-light of the evening played wry shadows on her dark expression of satisfaction.

"Of course, in any 'all-in' gamble, it must be expected that there will be discrepancy in the bets."

The Russian's face was tight with disbelief. He lifted a hand in a vague, sharp sweeping gesture, like he was attempting to deny what she'd revealed. She just snorted and cut him off when he tried to speak.

"And don't try to convince me that you have an ace up your sleeve; I'm well-aware that _I_ was that ace."

_So yeah._

_Consequently, his ass is __**toast**__ because you can't pay off media once shit has already gone out to a national audience- besides, it's way more beneficial for them to watch you fall than the alternative, so his chances of escape are pretty much moot except for his hold over the local police force._

_Except, of course, that he isn't a Japanese citizen._

_Which means it goes to Interpol._

_**Oops.**_

_Following this, Jennifer pulls her disappearing act again, and Kaiba throws down his gloves and has a gigantic fucking hissy fit about it because she's really kind of terrible, pulling this shit all the time, and follows her to America, where he finds her getting dishes thrown at her head by her mother, who went totally off of her rails when she started to get sick, which may actually also be a result __**of**__ her going totally off her rails. (Jennifer was trying to give them money for her mother's medical bills, and making a very clumsy attempt at reconciliation.) Jennifer's dad and brothers are super normal, likeable dudes and Kaiba hates every single one of them because he's an asshole. Her mom is crazy. Kaiba also hates her, though maybe with slightly more reason._

_Being a weird, twitchy little asshole, Jennifer books it out of there when he arrives, meaning that the vast majority of Kaiba hating her entire family takes place while she's already gone._

_He finds her in the scrapyard because despite the impression he gives off, he actually listens very carefully to what she says (though perhaps not for the best reasons) and they hang out in a junked car she was hiding in like a horrible little troglodytic freak. _

_She apologizes for her mother and he tells her he hates her family and she laughs even while she's getting mad at him about it._

_He makes some weird awful condescending reference to marriage and she looks at him like he's completely insane, which he is. (But so is she.)_

_She tells him that she can't have kids- you know, in case he didn't get the fucking gist of it when she said that her ovaries are non-functional and she's never had a period and also she probably wouldn't ever want kids because they're likely to turn out insane- and he says something along the lines of suggesting adoption, which is ironic and appropriate and also terrible because neither of them should ever, __**ever**__ be parents._

_She says as much and tries to smack him for being weird and awful and it's all very romantic if you screwed your head on backwards this morning._

_She says yes._

_They're terrible forever, and everybody likes them way more than they should. I never actually intended to write past her smacking him, but it is objective fact that Mokuba gets drunk at the reception and complains about his weird appropriative crush on her._

_I considered matching him up with (oh no I'm rereading this to remember her name and I'm laughing too much) Yuuna, Kaiba's secretary, but then she turned out to be a traitor, so it didn't work out._

_But yeah. This is all the shit I still remember about NEA despite not having touched or read it in a year and a half. _

_If anybody is interested in tagging after me to the Homestuck fandom, shoot me a private message and I'll tell you my Archive of Our Own account name._


End file.
